YouTube has announced that it has exceeded two billion video views per day. This, just 5 years after coming online.

Are you using YouTube and other Video sites to market your product or services. It’s a incredibly powerful tool and it’s is easier to utilize than you might think.

The announcement from the Google (Google)-owned video website comes as part of a larger initiative that the company is launching today to retell the history behind YouTube (YouTube) and its growth. Part of that campaign is the launch of “My YouTube Story” and the related YouTube 5 Year Channel.

The new YouTube 5 Year Channel is the landing page for the campaign. With it, YouTube intends to get users to submit videos about the impact YouTube has had on their lives. It will eventually be curated by Stephen Higgins, a documentary filmmaker. There is also an interactive timeline depicting the social media platform’s history and a collection of videos from celebrities discussing the five-year achievement.

We’ve been tracking YouTube’s explosive growth for some time, and the numbers are beyond impressive. There are now more than 24 hours of video uploaded every minute to the site, but even that is overshadowed by the newly-announced two billion video views per day stat.

As part of the celebration, YouTube also created a very detailed infographic tracing the site’s history, which you can peruse below. We’re also including a video YouTube created to celebrate its fifth anniversary

from the SEO Journal

Youtube is the largest video sharing site to date, with the most traffic and the highest amount of users on it making Youtube the definitive place for getting your videos published and marketed on. I have put together a guide on Youtube marketing for videos and I think you all will get a lot out of this.

Youtube is the second highest trafficked site globally according to alexa. Quantcast estimates 60 million unique viewers per month with a community base of predominately gen y viewers. Emarketer surveys recently did a research document on video viewer ship according to age and what they found is that the gen y generation views about 5-6 hours per day. The household incomes of these viewers are all pretty even from 0-100k +.

Youtube is optimized for 18 different languages and has a large presence in the asian market place. Youtube is the 4th most trafficked site in the united states so the power behind reaching your audience within America will be found on Youtube. To learn about more of the history of Youtube the wikipedia page does have some valuable info even though I hate giving wikipedia pages out it is useful.
Looking at the Youtube Algorithm:

Making it to the home page on Youtube is going to give your video the most amount of exposure. However, you don’t need to hit the home page to get your million views, it would sure help.

To do this you are looking at roughly a 15 day window of marketing efforts put into Youtube. This can be stretched out however depending on how you are trying to make it to the home page ( top favorites, top views, top comments etc.).

Keeping it Fresh

There is a freshness factor to your videos and it is much more difficult to get videos honors and movement within the search algorithm if the video is old. You would be better off removing that video and re-submitting it if you are looking to produce honors in a given field and to have a chance at hitting the home page with greater ease.

Keeping it Real

Factors to take into consideration when submitting a video is going to be your profile authority. How many friends does this profile have, how many subscribers and how many channel views. The reason this is important is to get more initial exposure and more views using a power profile will help you out greatly. Submitting a video on a orphan account with no friends or subscribers may raise some suspicion over at the Youtube headquarters. Make your profiles look natural and build them out.

Power of Views, Ratings, Favorites and Comments

Youtube has honors for each type of action that can be taken on a video. Honors for comments, favorites, ratings and views. As a marketer if you focus on anyone of these and get a substantial number of votes, favorites, ratings or views in a day you will see honors pretty quickly.

Remember the category you submit to and the type of channel you created has a lot to do with your success with getting honors. Gurus tend to get honors pretty easily within their channel area.
Tips for marketing on Youtube:

There are going to be a lot of tools Youtube has created for marketing your video. I will share them with you along with some other techniques we use.

1. On videos there is a share option. You can share by email address or with friends you have attached to your account. Remember the more friends you have the more people you can send to. Also you can leverage social media sites when you try to share as well.

2. Bulletin Boards: By posting a message this video will be displayed to all of your friends on your profile.

3. Invite to subscribe: This feature is available in your account once you request a friend invite. See the post I did here.

4. Add friends: Adding friends is a powerful way to gain exposure on Youtube. See my latest post here.

5. Make sure your video appeals to the community

6. Sharing videos with email: We like to go viral with our marketing campaigns for videos. Send videos out to your friends and family with a link to the video and an encouragement to share it.

7. Use StumbleUpon.com: Submit the video to video.stumbleupon.com and then import your email addresses and send to your friends on stumble upon.

8. Social Media it: You can leverage digg and other social sites like facebook and myspace to drive traffic to videos.

With the tools and tips I have listed out you will absolutely see success with your video marketing campaigns.

Good luck and I will see you all next time for the next in our series on video marketing – global countdown!