In 2008, there is plenty of buzz about the new and exciting online promotional tactics related to online video marketing and online video sharing.

YouTube is getting larger and larger with each passing day. It has become one of the most popular destinations on the net. The site does its own Flash conversion that is very tough with regard to digital video garbage handling. Some of the videos on YouTube simply look better than others because they came from better sources. With a little know-how, you can prepare your optimized video for YouTube.

Obviously the first step is to have video content created in order to then share the video online. To do this, you will need the equipment in order to shoot video, edit, and encode video. If you do not currently have a camcorder or other video camera, most digital cameras these days, and even some mobile phones, have video functionality built in. In addition, you can use a simple webcam to produce videos. As far as software for editing and encoding your videos, there are hundreds of choices. Even the basic video software that come with most new computers have the tools that you will need.

Of all the free tools out there, I would suggest that you use something other than Microsoft Movie Maker as it will give you more difficulty when trying to edit videos from a mobile phone source. Quicktime is nice with almost all formats.

Keep in mind that Youtube only offers support for some of the various video formats that are out there. If possible, I would suggest either a .mov or mp4 file as the file that you upload to Youtube. If the software that you have is not capable of handling export functions in these formats, then I would suggest trying something else.

When exporting your video, I would recommend exporting to the Youtube recommended size, which is 320×240. Most video cameras and camcorders shoot video at much higher resolutions so you will likely need to compress and resize your video to the aspect ratio of 320*240. If you are using a webcam, sometimes the video exported directly from the webcam is ready to go.

As far as the bit-rate, I would suggest that you use a higher bit rate than YouTube recommends. You can target your bit-rate to be 1000kbps and anything much higher than 1500kbps would really be more than you need and will clearly make the conversion process take longer. Ideally you are looking for a range of 700-1000 kbps.

Now that we have covered the size, quality, codecs, etc… what about audio? The best choice for the audio format is for you to choose the MP3 codec which most video editing software programs should have as a default setting option.

Take the output of your video file as .mov or .mp4 and before you move further it is time to have the preview of your video file. It should look nice. If you are satisfied with the outcome, go ahead with uploading your video.

The uploading of your video, depending on your connection, can take several minutes and if large enough file size, can take up to an hour on a slow connection. After you upload your video, Youtube then automatically begins the process of converting and encoding your file as a flash or flv file. This process compresses your file further but if you followed the suggestions above, you should have a nice resulting quality video on YouTube.

In terms of video search engine optimization, it is always important to know the keywords and phrases that are most relevant to both your content and of course, your target audience. You will want to be certain that you include these words and phrases within the video title, description, and tags. It is also important that you choose the most appropriate category on Youtube to submit your video to.

Choose and appropriate but popular category to post your video in and allow users to post comments, ratings, and embed your video elsewhere as this attracts incoming links to your video page on Youtube and provides you with the opportunity to show up in the Google search results as a result of their universal search initiative and purchase of Youtube.

Good luck video sharing on youtube. I would also suggest trying some of the various other sites out there.

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