Online video has finally hit prime-time. In 2008, video marketing and video sharing is the newest and most exciting field of online promotional marketing.
Certainly we have all heard about the biggest online video sharing website out there, Youtube. In 2007, Google purchased Youtube and even before this acquisition, the site was growing in popularity each and every day. Youtube is a wonderful site for users to get started with sharing online video content. However, because your video is converted to flash upon uploading it to the website, you need to learn the tips and techniques that will optimize your videos for the best quality result after uploading to the site.
In order to be able to share video online, you need to first have the equipment available to shoot video, capture it, and edit it for online usage. As for cameras, if you dont have a camcorder, most digital cameras, and even some cell phones have video functionality. As for Video editing software, there are many choices for everyone from the beginner to the expert. If you are short on change, most computers already come with tools like Microsoft Moviemaker or Apple iMovie in addition to the literally hundreds of free web-based video tools that you can use online.
If you are planning to upload and make movies from your mobile phone or other mobile device, I would plan on using something other than Microsoft MovieMaker. Apple Quicktime Pro, which is very inexpensive, is good to use with most any format.
YouTube only supports certain formats for input, so be cautious. It is better if you make a .mov or .mp4, so be sure your editor has the capability to handle that format efficiently. If the software that you have is not capable of doing so, find one that it because otherwise you may loose information from the video during upload.
The video should be set to the YouTube recommended size of 320240 QVGA. Your camera may have shot the video at a different aspect ratio than the 320240. So be prepared for some exercise but do not stretch or pull the frames.
It is advisable to make your video as bit-rich as you can. You can use a bit rate around 1000 kbps. Around 1200kbps it would probably overkill and take the video longer to process. 700kbps and 1000kbps should be the ideal range, you should be looking for.
As for audio, it is advisable to utilize the MP3 codec, which should be standard on most video editing software programs.
When you are done editing and exporting your video as a .mov or as a .mp4 format, you would obviously want to preview the video and make certain that it meets your standards for quality. If your resulting project is OK by you, go ahead and upload your video to Youtube.
The uploading of your video, depending on your connection, can take several minutes and if large enough file size, can take up to an hour on a slow connection. After you upload your video, Youtube then automatically begins the process of converting and encoding your file as a flash or flv file. This process compresses your file further but if you followed the suggestions above, you should have a nice resulting quality video on YouTube.
For Video SEO purposes, you need to make sure that you include the most relevant keywords and phrases in your title, description, and keyword tags. This is the only way that you will be able to attract the audience that you are hoping for.
Choose and appropriate but popular category to post your video in and allow users to post comments, ratings, and embed your video elsewhere as this attracts incoming links to your video page on Youtube and provides you with the opportunity to show up in the Google search results as a result of their universal search initiative and purchase of Youtube.
Good luck video sharing on youtube. I would also suggest trying some of the various other sites out there.



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