Did you know that 5% of time online is spent on YouTube?

It’s true. Or, at least that’s what YouTube claims. That’s not a figure you can ignore as an Internet marketer or small business looking to grow your website traffic.

I know a fair amount or small business owners don’t consider YouTube a business tool because their interaction with the site has been limited to high school kids spoofing TV shows and double rainbows sightings. In reality, a large number of people use YouTube to learn things and to discover new artists and trends. These people can be extremely receptive to targeted advertising while in this state.

For example, if I am searching for movies with “how to make pizza dough,” I might be very interested in your Italian cooking classes. If I’m watching videos about how to take a company public, maybe I’m ripe for your auditing services.

You can chuckle, but there are actually a number videos on that last topic on YouTube!

There are a few ways to use YouTube for advertising your business—two of which, we will cover here.

Promoted Videos

Your company can create the how-to and educational videos that your target audience would find compelling. This allows your prospective customer to grow familiar with you, your point of view and your products in a high-fidelity way without requiring a lot of your time.

With Promoted videos, you can bid on keywords and categories, similar to the way Google Ad Words works. If you have compelling video content that will spread your message, use Promoted Videos to increase your video’s audience.

This will cause them to appear high in search results, and appear at the top of the page when a user is viewing a relevant category. You pay each time someone clicks on your video and watches it in a promoted position (you don’t pay anything when they share it or come back and watch it multiple times!).

Even if your company doesn’t have videos to send users to, you can still take advantage of YouTube advertising with in-video ads.

YouTube Video Targeting Tool and In Video Ads

As a marketer, you likely has some insight into who your target audience is and can make some assumptions about the types of videos they may be watching. Remember the example of the pizza dough video? Use the Video Targeting Tool to find videos that you think your audience will be watching. You can search for videos by keyword and country, or search for videos being watched by your audience.

Once you find the videos and channels that you want to market in, you can place graphic or text ads right in the videos. Below is an example of each:

You can place text or banner ads in Videos on YouTube

In Video Ads are a bit of a throw back to traditional TV advertising, but more targeted and more accessible to small businesses, given your ability to test with limited ad dollars.

Spend a little time thinking about what videos your target customers may already be watching and explore the available content on YouTube. Just don’t blame me when you realize three hours have gone by and you’re still watching videos at work. Of course, then you’ll understand why so much time is spent on YouTube.

Advertisers haven’t arrived in mass yet, so the advertising rates can be more attractive than straight pay-per-click advertising on Google. I encourage you to consider the medium when planning your small business marketing.

Below are some resources to help you get to know YouTube advertising.

• An advertiser’s guide to YouTube
• Bubble: the best of advertising on YouTube
• YouTube advertising overview

Content syndication on the web is defined as the mass publication of a single article, podcast or video (content assets) across many outlets. In a nutshell: Write once, spread everywhere.

Syndicating your content has obvious benefits—expose more people to your message—but it also plays a vital part in search engine optimization. As the search engines see more of your message online, pointing back to your website, they give more weight to your site. This is one of the most natural and powerful ways to build links to your website. But, the real bonus is that these articles, videos and podcasts are being found in places with far more traffic than your website, such as YouTube, iTunes and Squidoo, and some of those people are clicking through to your site.

Content syndication is a key element to traffic building, and it helps with both article marketing and search engine optimization. I’m always a fan of leveraging a little bit of work into a whole lot of results, and that’s what good content asset and some content syndication can do for you!

Icons used in the info graphic courtesy of Icon Drawer.

Not just a few new names like the standard annual introduction that ushered in .info, .biz and the top country extensions (.uk), but this proposal would allow anyone (who can supply a $55,000 application fee) to create their own unique extension. Can you see sites like support.apple, store.apple and corporate.apple? What about entreprenuers and organizations who might try to create new standards like .band for musicians, .store for retailers or even .porn for, well…

In the twenty-plus years of the popular web, there have only been about 250 domain extensions introduced. And, only recently has anything but .com become commercially accepted by the masses, and that extension still has a near monopoly on commercially successful websites. But, the recent acceptance of .tv and .biz hint at what might happen as new generations come onto the web with increasing savvy. And trust me, entrepreneurs are tired of finding and buying parked domains from squatters, so there is certainly pent up demand.

It’s exciting to speculate on the impact.

Remember though, history has shown us that monopolies and entrenched cultural trends are uprooted not by one-up improvements, but by radical leap frogs. So, it’s likely that the .com extension will be unseated as the unquestionable commercial business identifier not by another domain extension, but by an entirely new way to access domain names.

For example, the days of dialing phone numbers from memory have all but vanished. Instead, we scroll through a list of contacts and speed dial someone in our address book. Many people are already championing a similar approach to websites.

We already use search engines and bookmarks to find much of the sites we visit on the web. Maybe the value of a domain is already on the decline?

Definitely something to consider before you make that five or six figure offer for that domain name you’ve got your eye on.

On May 6th, 2010, twelve days ago, I posted a short blog post titled “What is a content asset?” Admittedly, not an extremely competitive key phrase, but a term with moderate competition (26 million results in Google), that is used regularly in internet marketing.

I created and optimized this phrase for the term that I titled the post, “what is a content asset,” and built just a few links to the page (about five).

Less than two weeks later, I noticed the term in our top ten search engine keywords in our traffic sources. So, I started to review the rankings and this is what I found.

Google
#3 for “What is a content asset”
#4 for What is a content asset (no quotes)
#12 for content asset

Yahoo
#1 for “What is a content asset”
#1 for what is a content asset
#6 for content asset

Bing
#1 and #2 (via Linked In) for “What is a content asset”
Not in the first four pages for content asset.

And, I expect these rankings to improve as we build more links to the article.

To recap, here is the process I used for posting this article:

• Create a WordPress blog post, using an SEO plugin to set the page title and keywords.
• Matched the page title, URL file name and H1 tag exactly to our keyword target: what is a content asset?
• Linked to the post with two Twitter accounts, one Linked In account, one Facebook link and one Digg link.

I did this all in about an hour. Then, I moved onto other business unrelated to this post—only to be brought back to analyze this post because it came up so high in our traffic sources so quickly. I’d like to point out that we write articles like this all the time, some of which rise to the top while others do not. But, it’s this collective and fragmented keyword strategy that brings us our complete traffic. Frankly, we are unsure which will be the home runs, so we make lots of concerted efforts to increase our likelihood of winning.

This is a concrete example of the work we do for our clients, and a big part of our own internet marketing.

Success came from identifying related keywords to our market, generating an optimized article and building quality links to that page. Assuming that we have the right call to actions that will lead interested lurkers into buyers or subscribers, we’ll be earning a respectable return on our investment on this content asset soon.

A content asset is really just some piece of content that you can use as a business tool, either by monetizing it directly (purchasable book) or using it to attract new customers (free article). Often, this content asset is repackaged and distributed in numerous formats and mediums. Think about how a movie is first released on the big screen, broken down into small parts for trailers and web previews, then taken to DVD, then presented on TV. Each time the asset is used, it’s just a variation of the original working in some other way.

On the web, content assets are typically articles, e-books, podcasts or videos. These anchor content assets can be broken up into smaller chunks and used as blog posts, tweets, You Tube shorts, email blasts and even search engine ads. The point is, you develop it once, and if it’s a valuable tool to generate new business, you’re going to want to break it up and use it across as many mediums and channels as you think you can without diminishing its value.

The above examples show how large content assets can be divided and distributed. Additionally, content assets can be aggregated and then distributed. There have been numerous books published recently that are simply large collections of blog posts edited and assembled in a thematic or chronological way.

if you’re involved in search engine optimization, what you’re optimizing are your content assets. If you’re involved in social media marketing, you’re likely using bite size ideas that come from a larger article or white paper, which are also content assets. And, if you’re creating a podcast or You Tube videos, those too can be used in an array of ways on the web to generate more business.

Inventory your site or file server and see what kind content assets you have in your inventory that can be taken advantage of to generate new business. Think: create once, reuse many times.

I often compare it to professional networking or losing weight, as it isn’t rocket science, but it does require a sustained effort of many different types of activities. And, when you don’t see results immediately, it can be difficult to maintain your effort level.

The web is saturated with articles suggesting SEO tactics, but there is little information about how the search engines define their rankings. This is due to the ever-changing nature of these formulas.

While the full details of search engine results is above the scope of any single article, SEO Moz does a bang-up job of summarizing the high impact items used to influence the results. The most current Search Engine Ranking Factors article is online here, and sums up the top factors clearly and visually.

It seems that while there are many new tactics and tools always becoming available, but nothing has unseated good ol’ fashioned quality link building and content publishing.

If you don’t know where to start, and you want to invest time in your search engine rankings, start writing relevant and attractive content. If you’re writing what your customers want to know about, there’s a good chance they will link to it. Over time, with a little bit of sustained effort, you’ll be sure to increase your traffic and search engine rankings.

Write for your customers and promote the content (using Digg, Twitter, etc). It’s a fundamental strategy for SEO.

It’s these things that take a little more commitment to get done if you want results. For example, as business owners, we all know that we need to do at least some accounting, customer service and selling – even if they aren’t our strengths.

For many professionals, you can add blogging to the list.

Like sales, you shouldn’t ignore blogging if you want to get maximum results out of your business. Yet, many of us start with the best of intentions and then taper off, and your blog becomes the dusty treadmill in the basement—creating guilt each time you think about it.

The guilt is because we know that blogging, just like using that treadmill, will get us the results we really want. Yet, we procrastinate and get nothing out of our investment.

So, I offer a parallel mindset to any of you who have made the leap to a committing to a habit that you previously dreaded. Approach blogging like running.

Colleen at Hubspot wrote an insightful post this morning on this very subject. She presents this very sharp and true fact that many of us refuse to embrace:

Blogging is probably the most efficient and most effective way to drive traffic to your website. An hour or two per week and you are creating a marketing annuity. Like running guarantees to burn calories, blogging absolutely guarantees more, free, search-based traffic.

For me, like so many others, the efforts that require small, sustained tasks over time are the hardest to accomplish. But, those can also be the most satisfying accomplishments. You can blog, and you can generate large amounts of targeted traffic over time even if it isn’t your favorite thing to do. If you absolutely hate it, find someone to help you or turn your ideas into content. But, start today and keep it up.

The free and continuous traffic you look at in your logs a year from now will be more satisfying that any procrastination or excuses you can come up with today.

Check out Colleen’s post for more inspiration: Why Blogging is Like Running.