I have a weird question for you. Has anyone ever sent you an email saying something like this:

"I just saw this hilarious video on YouTube.com you have got to check it out!"

Then they give you the link to the video?

Here's one more question. Have you ever considered that there's a lot of money to be made by using YouTube.com to generate traffic?

Let's face it, people are going absolutely nuts over YouTube.com. Millions of people use the site every single day, and some of those silly videos get millions of views. Only this evening I was watching a popular chat show here in the UK called "Richard & Judy" and they had a whole 30 minute slot showing amusing videos from the site.

Among the top 25 Web brands ranked by unique audience, YouTube was the fastest growing from January to June 2006, increasing 297 percent, from a monthly unique audience of 4.9 million to 19.6 million.

The number of Web pages viewed has grown even faster, increasing 515 percent, from 117.6 million in January to 724.0 million in June. The average time spent at the site has increased 64 percent during the same period, from just over 17 minutes to nearly 28 minutes."

Here are 5 simple tips for generating website traffic from your YouTube video

1. Before you even start creating your video do some keyword research at YouTube to discover what keywords are popular in your market and what types of video get most views.

2. When you create your account be sure to create both a custom profile and your own custom channel information to increase your chance of being found by eager viewers.

3. Be sure to include your URL in the video but be subtle about it as you don’t want your video to scream “advertisement”.

4. Create a video that will get people’s attention or generate a buzz as you want to create a viral effect.

5. People have short attention spans so keep your video as short as possible and less than 2 minutes at most.

It is relatively easy to get a lot of people to view your videos and takes little effort to get a top 10 ranked video in the YouTube search results even if your video is not that good. So a little effort could see significant traffic visiting your website.

Jeff McCall
http://www.estreetuk.com/tubetraffic/