We've talked before about using YouTube to promote your business.Increasing numbers of people go to YouTube as a source of information early in their research and decision processes. Many find video reviews of products more convincing than ads. Millions use YouTube for recreation and learning.

What's more, having uploaded a video to YouTube, you can then easily embed it into other websites, including your blog, your Facebook page, or your Squidoo lens. Other people can do the same -- persuading a few dozen staff members to upload your video to their Facebook pages or blogs can give you lots of immediate links, and creating a video that people like well enough to embed in their pages without your asking can give you valuable levels of free publicity.

Say you've gone that route, though, how can you tell what kind of results you're getting? Certainly, when your customers tell you they want that item they saw on YouTube, you've got a hint. But there's more data available.

YouTube now collects and shares with you information about  your videos. Just sign in and go to your videos -- the ones you've uploaded -- and you can see a number of possible actions to take. You can play, delete, or annotate your video, and there's also a button labeled "insight." This is the button that tells you who's viewing your video.

Click on "insight" and you'll see these buttons:

Views

Discovery

Demographics

Community

Hot Spots

Views tells you  how many people have looked at your video. You can ask to see how many viewers there are in different countries and regions, and you can check on relatively popularity in different countries. You can also check a box saying "show unique users" which will tell you how many different people (or at least different computers) watched.

Discovery tells you how people found your video: by searching at YouTube, by watching it on a viewer embedded at another site, by following a link online, by watching it after seeing a related video, or by clicking on a link in an email or IM.

Demographics tells you  the ages of the people who viewed, and whether they're male or female. As you can imagine, this isn't very precise, and a new video may not have enough information to guess, but it can give you an idea of what groups are paying attention to your video.

Community measures how people are repsonding to your video,  for example by commenting or uploading a video response, and where in th world the people who respond are.

Hot Spots shows viewer activity. It will, for example, let you know that people are only watching part of your video, or that they're rewinding to see a favorite section again.

This gives you some valuable market data, as well as allowing you to see your video's popularity.

If you're not yet using video for promotion, and you're beginning to think it's time, contact Onsharp about creating a promotional video for you. 

A well-optimized website is findable: if people are looking for you, they'll find you.

What if they're not looking for you? This can happen. You may have a new product, or a special service that people would value -- but they haven't thought about it yet. You may be selling a luxury item or an impulse item, rather than the kind of thing people go to the search engines for.

Then you need not only search engine optimization, which makes your site findable and usable, but also search engine marketing, which draws attention to your site.

Before we leave the subject of SEO, let's look at the borderline between SEO and SEM: search positioning. Sometimes you need to make your site findable not for the name of the product or service, but for the problem it solves or the benefit it conveys.

You have a new way to dispose of toxic waste? Optimize your site for the name of your product, but also for "toxic waste disposal" and "hospital waste management." You have a luxuriously scented dish detergent and no one's looking for "luxury dish soap"? Optimize for "making housework fun" or "biodegradable cleaning supplies" or  "housewarming gifts."

You need to to do research to find the right keywords, of course, but a change of direction can do wonders. 

Back to SEM. The internet is like the world's enormous marketplace. But for that very reason, people turn away from obvious advertising. Do some advertising, but consider these other options as well:

• Get involved in the community. 120 million people log onto Facebook every day. Does your product have a page there?
• Who are the bloggers that your target audience reads and listens to? Make friends, ask them for honest reviews of your products, participate in the conversations at their sites. If you have something great to offer, they'll want to share it with their visitors.
• What are the sources of information people turn to when they have the problem that your product solves? Online directories, magazines, and authoritative websites are often the first places people go for answers to their questions. Ask for links to your site. 
• Use your physical-world networks to spread the word. Put your URL on your business cards, your signs, your products. Share your expertise and information with people, and invite them to visit your site.

The rule of thumb for marketing in the physical world is that it takes five months to see results: anything that happens before that is just gravy. The internet can sometimes work faster -- but it's still a good rule of thumb. You just may get more gravy.

A well-optimized website is the first step toward a successful web strategy. Good keyword-rich content, standards-compliant coding, and a well-thought-out design will get you far.

But you can't sit back after that and wait for someone to come to your site. You'll need to submit your site to search engines (yes, they'll probably notice it eventually even if you don't, but we saw a site this morning which is five months old and still unindexed. Do you want to wait that long?) and do basic linkbuilding to make sure you can be found easily. You'll want to watch the keywords your visitors are using to make sure that the search engines understand what your site is about and are offering it to people who are looking for the goods and services you offer. You'll want to develop a marketing strategy that includes your website as one of the primary tools.

These things are part of the set-up process for your website. They give you essential information that may lead to some tweaks in your content and design.

Then you need ongoing follow up. You need to keep track of your rankings and your analytics on a weekly or monthly basis (depends how fast things change in your industry) to make certain that you get the results you want. Here are some things that this kind of regular oversight offers:

• You can see whether everything is going as it should, in the direction of steady growth, or whether you need to make changes to respond to changes in circumstances.
• You can identify and respond to opportunities -- an increase in visitors from an unexpected source, for example.
• You can see what kinds of results you get from specific marketing efforts, including offline actions.
• You can tell what kind of content brings traffic to your site, and add or update that kind of content frequently to keep your site fresh and appealing to human visitors and to search engines.
• You can see seasonal trends, or general market trends, early enough to adjust your strategy.
• You can catch small problems before they become big problems.
  

If you don't keep track, you won't get the information you need. It's that simple. So you need to gather and analyze data about your website, and to use that infromation in decision-making. You need to be prepared to make changes at your website or in your use of your website as they're needed.

You can do this yourself. If you can tell that doing so wouldn't be the best use of your time, you can contact Onsharp to discuss our affordable SEO packages.
 

Building a website for your business is an investment of time, money, and effort. It's essential, but it's not a small thing for a company to do.

And yet a surprising number of companies determine to get themselves a website with the same mental set they might have when ordering a box of business cards. They know they need it, they want it to look good, and that's it.

Your website is an essential element of your overall marketing and customer communication strategy.

Your website should present your unique selling proposition clearly. It should say to the most casual or hurried viewer exactly what you offer and how they can get it.

If you're using social media, email marketing and other methods well, then many of the people who come to your website will already be sold on your products and services before they arrive. They know you from LinkedIn, they've seen your special offers mentioned at Twitter, or they searched for your company by name. They should be able to buy right away.

If you're using search engine optimization well, another large segment of your visitors will never have heard of your company before they arrive. You, for example, might have come here to learn more about web strategy. You may only now be realizing that this blog belongs to Onsharp, a Fargo web design firm that specializes in strategy, among other things. Visitors who've reached you at the information-seeking stage of their user journey should be able to find the information they want, to find out about your company once they've arrived -- and to find their way back to your website easily when they think of you again.

What does this mean for your website? At the most basic, is means that your company name and logo should be right there in the upper left hand corner where people always look. Your contact information -- phone number, email link, or tab for Contact -- should be visible above the fold. The method for getting goods and services should be very obvious. 

Check your company website. Is the contact info down at the bottom of the page, only visible to people who scroll down there? Does your visitor have to search through the website and employ critical thinking to figure out how to hire you or buy your products? Is the average visitor still wondering what you do 30 seconds after arriving at your website?

If so, it's time to change your strategy.