YouTube Video Marketing

You Tube is a great resort for marketing when you realize that it streams over two billion videos every day and has a hundred million unique users every month in the US alone. You Tube is a great place to find customers, but you don't necessarily need to produce your own videos -- you can promote your business through other people's videos with You Tube’s in-video and in-stream advertising.

This form of advertising is also very targeted to viewers through ad demographics, language, interests, geography, video content and keywords. Your ads can be targeted to individual videos and channels and when you think of all those viral videos out there with millions of views, you could be onto a winner for your business.

Here are several ways to pay for your advertising, you can either pay on a cost per thousand, a CPM or a cost per click basis and it is also possible to pay on a cost per view basis. All in all, it is a pretty good way to advertise and very cost-effective. So what is the difference between these different methods of advertising with You Tube?

In-video ads

These are either text based ads or banner style ads using graphics that run when the video begins to play. If a viewer clicks on the ad, it will point to an external URL or your own video. These in-video ads are a great way to supplement your other advertising -- just make sure they are identical if you want to brand your advertising so that people will recognize all your online display ads and search engine ads.

In-stream ads

In stream ads run before, during or after a video and are quite short -- they cannot be longer than 15 seconds if the video is less than 10 minutes long. For longer videos over 10 minutes, you are allowed up to 30 seconds.

If you go for in-stream ads, you need to create a very concise and to-the-point advert with clear instructions on where viewers can find you and don't forget a strong call to action.

If you are not sure how to go about producing your own video ad, you can use a service such as Spot Mixer, www.spotmixer.com where you can use a template to build your own video ad.

Mobile in-stream ads

These work on mobile devices via the You Tube 2.0 Android App for mobile Partner Watch pages. Your video ad will show before the video runs.

You can also have a 1-day Mobile Roadblock if you have a large advertising budget and this will reach customers on iPhones, Blackberries, Androids and Window phones. Basically the way the roadblock works is that you buy all the available ad impressions for a whole day. With this method, you have the potential in a 24-hour period to reach over 7 million viewers. You can get it on www.m-tube.com .

One thing to be aware of is that if you are linking to your website through mobile in-stream ads, make sure your ads link to a website that is optimized for mobile devices, otherwise you are wasting your time and money.