One of the most popular websites on the entire internet is Google’s YouTube. With the ability to host videos placed there by movie studios, political candidates, television networks, and of course the regular users of the service too, YouTube has become the place to go to watch video content online. One of the best moves that webmasters or bloggers can use to promote their own web content is to harness the power of other more popular websites and web service providers. By capitalizing on the advertising done by these other services, a blogger can have their content or site promoted in ways that they otherwise would not be able to accomplish.

Using YouTube to promote your blog is actually a fairly simple process if you have all of the necessary equipment. Other than the computer and internet connection that you already have if you are an active blogger, you will also need to have either your own digital video camera or access to a digital video camera and the software package used to edit the images that it records. Digital video cameras, though still somewhat expensive, have been coming down in price over the years and are surprisingly affordable these days.

Step 1

The first thing you will need to do is decide what type of video you will film. You can film a funny or entertaining video, or you could also decide to shoot a video that is more professional in nature, possibly showing a process or how-to type of activity.

Step 2

Now that you know what type of video you will be filming, you need to actually come up with the subject matter. The most effective subject matter for you to film is going to be something related to the niche of your blog. If you blog about football, then filming some great plays or funny bloopers would be a nice fit. Filming footage of a road trip out the window of your car would be a great idea if you blog about travel or driving issues. If you blog about hunting, filming a video showing the process of properly cleaning a hunting rifle or how to train a bird dog would be a great idea. The point is that you want a video that will attract the same type of viewers that you want frequenting your blog.

Step 3

The actual filming of the video would come next, to accomplish this you may need to enlist the help of friends, co-workers, or employees. Practice does indeed make perfect, so don’t be afraid to rehearse if that is what is needed for the content you are producing. Also, video editing software is sophisticated yet easy to use, so go ahead and run through your scenes twice or three times if possible, it can all be edited together later.

Step 4

Now that the footage is shot, you will need to edit it down so that it looks the way you would like it to. Once it is finished going through the editing process, there is one more step and it is the most important step when it comes to using YouTube to promote your blog. Watermarking is a term describing the process of putting one image over or within another. Governments use watermarking to make it easier to tell real money apart from counterfeit money, and often photographers use watermarking as a way to put their logo or the word “sample” across a photo they want to display but not allow people to copy and use for themselves. What you will want to do is use the video editing software to watermark the URL or logo of your blog across the bottom of your video. Most software used to edit videos can do this fairly simply and when you are done there should be a logo or URL of your site appearing on the bottom of the frame of your video footage from beginning to end.

Step 5

The only thing left to do is to log in to YouTube and submit your new video. This is also a fairly easy process and once it is uploaded, your new video is ready for the world to see. During the submission process you will also be able to add a description and some tag words to describe the content of the video. Don’t only use words that describe what the video is about, but also use words that are in fact some of the more well used keywords of your blog.

Once you have completed all of these steps, your video will be hosted on one of the most popular websites on the internet just waiting for people to come watch it, watch it again, embed it on their own blogs and websites, and share it with friends. Each time that the video is viewed a new pair of eyes will see your logo or URL and possibly decide to visit your blog because of it.

Using YouTube to promote your own blog is an incredibly smart way to go about marketing your site. In a sense, you are combining your creativity and intelligence with the money and marketing of Google in a joint effort to promote your blog. While blogging is fun and somewhat easy to do, driving traffic to your blog can sometimes be rather hard to do. This difficult task is made somewhat easier when you can borrow the advertising muscle of one of the best and most popular websites on the internet, YouTube.