Video is the future of the internet and a recent study showed that mobile users alone will consume 1.3 billion gigabytes of video a month by 2017. That means if you want to be competitive then you will need to get up to snuff and the fastest way to start using online video to market your brand is to use YouTube. If you truly want to have a great YouTube Marketing campaign, you’ll need these basic tips.

Why YouTube? With over 110 million unique visitors a month who watch, on average, 65 videos per month, why would you want to be excluded from that? There are loads of opportunities available to market your product or service and expand brand awareness. Of course you’ve got to start somewhere so create an account, setup a channel and get it looking how you want it to look.

YouTube has a search algorithm that includes the optimization of the following: Title, Description, tags, Number of views and Rating. When you are first creating and uploading you only have control over the first three. The last two come later but you can help yourself in this regard. Make sure that the content is interesting and that it makes people want to interact and respond. If your creative quality is low and your content either uninteresting or uninformative, you simply won’t get the views and ratings you need to make your YouTube Marketing campaign successful. The best idea for content? A How-To video. They generally get loads of views and if you can tie your brand into it then you’re on the road to marketing success.

Optimization is key so that your videos are found in searches. YouTube has over 3.5 billion searches a month making it the second largest search engine in the world behind Google. The first things to take into consideration when doing optimization are having a good title that describes your video but is interesting, using relevant tags that pertain to your video’s content and writing a concise description that makes people want to watch the video. A secret tip is to have the best info in the first 27 characters, including a clickable link. That is the number of characters that is shown prior to the three dots (?) that are clicked to read more. A nice short keyword as a clickable link is a great idea.

Other things that work for interaction are continued branding and calls to action throughout the video, a URL and phone number that show up in the video. Show the call-to-action in the thumbnail if you can manage it. Once your video is up add comments on popular videos with links to your videos but don’t overdo it as it will look like spam. Also you might consider making spin-offs of already popular videos. This is not an all-inclusive list of things to take into account when attempting YouTube Marketing, but they’re a sure way to get you on the road. More tips can be found at ReelSEO.com.

For more tips on how to best leverage online videos for marketing, visit ReelSEO.com, the Online Video Marketer’s Guide. At ReelSEO, you can learn how best to create, publish, and optimize online videos and how best to use YouTube for video marketing