After being a useless member for almost a year, I felt maybe it's my time for glory (or maybe because I am little bored) ;)

Anyway, I had planned to put this content on my blog but instead am writing it for YOUmoz since I wanted to know what it felt like to get read by someone/humans. So here we go...

I have seen many webmasters surprisingly/shockingly ignoring YouTube (even though Google has decided to put YouTube videos on almost every search query nowadays) as a great promotional medium and traffic generator. In this post, I'll tell you step by step how you can get great traffic from YouTube. In the end, I have also shared my own YouTube case study.

How to Get Traffic from YouTube

1. Create a Nice Video. There is software which can convert PPT into videos, but personally I will advise you to spend 100 bucks and find someone to create a professional video which you can use everywhere. I have seen people offering such services at DigitalPoint or you can find such people on freelance websites like Rentacoder.com or getafreelancer.com.
2. Give it a Nice Title. The title is one of the most important things of your video. Give it a title which can rank in Google as well as catch user attention, something like "How to Buy Cheap Second Hand Bikes - Example.com."
3. Don't forget to Watermark it. Make sure every frame/slide of the video has small watermark of your site.
   
4. Leave it for More. Create the video in such a way that it's informative yet leave enough out so the user comes to your site. Saying this, it will be good if the video is indeed informative and useful. Give the 80% on the video and say the rest is on the site. 
   
5. Add a Nice Description. Put some informative content in the description (i.e., "more info...") section of your video. Make sure you link to your site from it. Lots of people use YouTube feeds that rip the descriptions of YouTube videos, so that's added traffic for you. Just imagine how much continuous traffic a video can bring you if it is indeed good and informative.
   
6. Disable Ratings and Comments. You don't want those "Your Mom is..." or "Forward this to 5 people or you will die" kind of comments in your video, do you? Just disable comments and ratings.

How to Increase Views of Your YouTube Video

Google normally shows videos which have high views in their SERPs, so you also need to make sure your video initially gets good views (after that it will start going up on its own). For this you can do the following:

1. Promote your video on your blog and almost everywhere. Link it from every place you can find. Link it from Squidoo lenses of yours (I often do this). Send it to friends and others.
2. There are some people at Digitalpoint selling 10k YouTube views for few bucks (eh? must be PTC or proxy traffic), so you can hire them to quickly lead the charts. Remember, people often like to sort the YouTube search results as page views. This is where you can score.
3. If nothing works and you are way too desperate, than start rickrolling (for example, "Check out Hot Latino Teens kissing here <your video link>"). Ok, I am just joking (you should not play with people's emotions like this!!!). Anyway, I don't think things will come to this level if you are imaginative.

My Case Study

Just to test whether YouTube can indeed work for me, I created a 3 page PowerPoint presentation and converted it into video (check download.com for such software). It was nothing great, to be honest. I put come content into the slides with my site link at the bottom of all the pages. I gave it a nice, catchy title and description and again linked to my site. I also linked to it from my PR4 Squidoo page, which gets 400+ views per week. After a month, my video had gotten a few hundred views (right now, it's about to touch 1000). It's not bad for a 1 hour effort and the fact that I wasn't serious about the whole campaign, but I can see a potential here and I may seriously do it for a client in the future and update you guys with the results.

This post is getting way too lengthy; hence, I won't talk much about Metacafe and Veoh, but things pretty much work in the same way for those sites. I hope you guys found this post useful! I will try to be more active from now on (a lot depends on whether Rebecca decides to publish this post or not!).

Cheers and have a nice day!