If you own an online business and want to get more traffic, you should look into video marketing. Creating videos and utilizing free video-sharing sites like YouTube, can get the word out about your business and increase traffic to your website substantially.

Best of all, traffic generated by videos you publish on YouTube and other video-sharing sites, is long-term traffic; your videos can continue to send you visitors for a long time. If you are ‘lucky’ and publish a hit – a video that gets popular – that video can ‘go viral’ and be spread all over the Internet. In other words, the potential for traffic from video marketing is huge.

Keep in mind also, that people are using YouTube not only to share their videos or view videos for fun, but they use it as a search engine, too. Thousands of people go to YouTube when they want to find an answer to a question or solve a problem or find tutorials, and Google estimates that 20% of all searches end at a video.

The only thing you have to do to reach out to millions of internet users that visit YouTube daily, is to create a free account at YouTube and upload your video. However, there are literally billions of videos online, so the competition is hard, and that’s why you need to optimize your videos to improve their visibility.

Of course there are other video-sharing sites out there, like Dailymotion and Vimeo, but YouTube is by far the largest and considered the video-site by the vast majority of people. So it is a great potential online marketing tool, and if you publish videos that many people like, you will receive a stream of visitors to your website that are looking for more information.

Making helpful and well informed videos also will help build your reputation as an expert in your niche, and an increasing number of people will click through to your website because they expect more high quality content there.

To actually create the videos you will need a video recorder of some kind. It can be a camcorder, a digital camera, a webcam or screen-capture software. It doesn’t have to be professional equipment, because amateurish looking videos can get just as popular as professionally created videos.

If you don’t have video making tools, or you from some reason don’t want to create videos yourself, you can outsource the task, have other people do it for you. There are many services and people that will make videos for you; for affordable services you can look at Fiverr.com and the Special Offers section at WarriorForum.com.

Obviously, video marketing will only be successful if you create videos that people like and want to watch. It is difficult to tell how to make videos that will become popular, but videos that have that real life authenticity, which makes people recognize their own life from it, tend to be popular among the video audience.

It’s a good idea to study other people’s popular videos to see if there are certain common qualities that make them popular. If you find such specific qualities, you can try to implement those qualities in your own videos. Don’t expect that your first video be ‘perfect’, however it gets better with practice.