Video marketing on YouTube is an incredible opportunity for internet marketers. It’s already kind of hard to remember, but before YouTube hit the scene hosting video was a source of endless frustration. It is technically challenging, bandwidth-hogging, fraught with file format peril, and poses unique search challenges.

Unless you just post your videos to YouTube and let Google handle all these problems. You the intrepid video marketer, on the other hand, get to focus on the fun stuff: Search engine optimization (SEO). And YouTube gives you a wide array of opportunities to help ensure that users find your video, and ultimately, your site. Depending on how well you choose your long-tail keywords, it’s possible that you could get a video ranked on page 1 with just five minutes of work. The golden rule: every time you type something on YouTube, expect it to get indexed.

1. Your username: Don’t call register L0serB0y1987 unless you’re marketing a product to dweebs who were born in 1987. If you’re promoting an eczema product, do some keyword research and register as EczemaTreatmentsAndCures. Google does factor in the username.
2. Your video’s tags: Obviously, we humans use tags as search aids. You think you get irritated when you click on an email that says “Urgent matter” and end up with a Nigerian bank scam onscreen? Google does too. You should tag your video with the keywords you want people to use in their searches for your product. Keep that set of keywords tight, to improve  targeting.
3. Description: The video description field seems to be limitless, and it is indexed. Drop in an article or two. If you don’t have one handy, use one from an article directory like EzineArticles. Just be sure to include the resource box. It’s required by licensing terms, it’s the right thing to do regardless, and it won’t hurt your search results.
4. Related videos: Make sure the related videos feature is either turned off or features other videos you did (if they’re in the same niche).
5. Name of video: Duh. Still, don’t get cutesy with your video’s name. Keep it readable but keyword-packed, just like the title you’d use in an article directory or social bookmarking site.

Remember that Google (which owns YouTube) indexes every bit of text it finds when you post a video. Make sure your contributions reflect that reality every step of the way, and you’ll reap the benefits in free traffic.

280Slides Review (still in beta but worth a look anyway)

280Slides has hit the ground running, in a beta version that’s better than most production sites. It’s an online, browser-based application that lets you create PowerPoint slide decks, and save them as PDF to boot. Highlights:

• Create slide shows with a solidly professional interface that feels like the best of PowerPoint and Pages combined
• YouTube-style player with equally similar embed codes
• Instant publishing to SlideShare.net, allowing you to publish your presentation to a high PR-ranked site in seconds
• Attractive themes
• Import feature
• Ability to insert pictures and videos into a presentation
• Speaker’s notes
• Supports the Google Chrome browser
• Saves to PowerPoint, PDF, and OpenDocument

Here’s an embedded show I created in a very few minutes.

280Slides review: Pros

• Intuitive interface both for learning and for repeat use
• Very, very fast to create highly professional-appearing slide shows
• Makes creating text boxes on slides a breeze, far better than any similar product on the Web
• Nice public profile; more fodder for search engines
• Several nice templates
• Though beta, it’s ready for production use

280Slides review: Cons

• Slides don’t look as good viewed in PowerPoint
• Undo occasionally went too far, undoing more than I wanted (but this is a beta app)
• No master slide concept
• No watermark concept
• Themes are good but more is always good
• Limited to a fixed set of text sizes
• Can’t include a hyperlink in a slide

“Video marketing” sounds like a big deal, but it doesn’t have to be. Savvy internet marketers are giving their campaigns a rich new source of visitors and traffic with what looks like decades-old technology: PowerPoint, and things that look like PowerPoint.

In today’s video marketing, you create anything one to a dozen slides (typically), accompanied by a voice and maybe a soundtrack,  then get the whole thing down on video. PowerPoint and Apple’s Keynote are tremendous starting points, but don’t worry about buying software if you don’t have them. There are free apps every step of the way, so don’t worry about cost. This begs the question. If you’ve sat through boring PowerPoints before, you’re quite rightly asking why you’d want to subject others to that kind of treatment and how, incidentally, could they be “traffic powerhouses”? Here are 5 reasons even boring videos make good marketing sense.

Automatically gives you a podcast and an article, too! Once you’ve created a video, you have a script that can be turned into an article, and a soundtrack you can use as a podcast.  And why not blog posts announcing each one? Presto, at least 6 pieces of content for the price of one.

Multiple involvement devices: from Related Videos to watermarks, to music to spinning logos. A video gives its consumer many, many ways to be drawn into your universe. Maybe they like your voice. Maybe they like your looks, if you’ve included yourself in the video. Maybe your background music perks up their ears. Maybe you’re graphically gifted and your slides just look good. Every one of these possibilities can mean a customer who’s more ready to visit your site.

Discipline. A simple slide show forces you to get the point across in very few words. This hones your message and forces you to stay on point. Because of this I’m starting to do videos first, then write articles after the videos have been completed. I waste less of the reader’s valuable time and am more likely to say something she wants to hear.

DocsToc and ScribDoc are underrated for SEO. Look carefully at your Google search results. I’m seeing sites like DocsToc and ScribDoc (which accept actual PowerPoint decks as is) appear very high, and they both have killer page rank.

YouTube’s Description is a secret SEO powerhouse: The video description in YouTube can hold articles at least 1,000 words long. Since Google indexes the descriptions, you have some serious search real estate to play with. Smart marketers put a clickable link in the very first part of the description, and smarter marketers include a call to action right after that link (“Click to claim your free special report showing how to become a better public speaker in just 5 minutes”).

So why would someone want to view your slide show? The obvious answer is that you should be promoting a product, whether it’s your own, that of a client, or an affiliate offer, that scratches someone’s itch. They’ve landed on your slide show because they think it will solve a problem.

Last but certainly not least, here’s a bonus reason slide shows are traffic powerhouses: even if your slide show never gets read, it will yield so many other pieces of content and sources of traffic that it does the job it was meant for, popularity contest or not. Try starting your next article as a slide show, and watch your traffic soar along with your productivity.