I recently heard that 45 percent of all shared content online comes from video. Which would explain why You Tube is now ranked as the second most searched site, surpassed only by Google. So it seems pretty clear that video has become a prominent marketing tool for many companies, and now you may be wondering how to get in the game.

For the last 6 months Bailey Gardiner has hosted BGTV, a channel on each of the popular video sharing sites where we share our agency and client videos. We have tested out various theories on how to gain traffic and have thus far had more than 1,100 views. We’ve found that while there is no guaranteed way to make a video go viral, there are definitely things you can do to improve your chances. Here are a couple tips to get you started:

• Utilize tools such as tubemogul which make it easy to upload your video onto multiple sites at once. BGTV currently exists on 10 separate sites reaching a variety of audiences. Having to individually load every video onto each site would become quite time consuming and would make it challenging to keep content fresh.

• Spend a bit of time getting to know each site. They vary in their specialties and the ways in which they are used and in order to maximize your impact, it’s good to know a little bit about the community you are about to become involved in. Also, be aware that some sites have specific parameters such as Howcast and 5min. Both these sites require users to show how to do something.

• Create a personality. It’s best to have a fully developed profile so that people who find your channel stay and view more. The more that is on your profile, the more interesting you become. It also improves your search-ability within the site to have more content.

• Start making connections. View other people who are posting video’s similar to yours and make comments. Subscribe to their feeds if you like what you see. Look for your target audience as well, and find a way to connect with them.

• Use your other social media profiles to promote your videos. Links to new videos can be posted on Twitter, Facebook or your blog, to increase traffic to your channel.

• Monitor your results. This way you can see what’s working and what to do more of. Each site will tell you how many views each of your videos are receiving. Tubemogul can also be used to monitor trends through their daily count of your sites page views and their graphing system. Below you’ll see the graph of BGTV’s views on You Tube.  You can distinctly see the week in the beginning of July in which we fully developed the profile. Traffic has been significantly greater since that time.

So now you have the basics and you’re ready to get started. Once you have created your profiles on each site, come find us. We would be happy to connect with you.