Online video has finally hit prime-time. In 2008, video marketing and video sharing is the newest and most exciting field of online promotional marketing.

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 you need to first determine the camera and video editing software that you will be using. Know the format of video you are starting with. Most digital cameras today shoot video, as do most phones, which is a great cheap way to start. It is irrelevant where your video comes from; the responsibility lies on you to make it breathtaking. There are tons of editing tools on the Internet available for anyone to use on almost any platform; the latest computers already have these tools along with the basic install for just such editing requirements.

While Microsoft MovieMaker is a great introductory program for video editing, it does not do well with videos that are created using a mobile phone. If you are going to capture video from a cameraphone for use on youtube, I would suggest getting Quicktime Pro from Apple. This is a very inexpensive upgrade and can handle conversion in multiple formats.

It is important to note that youtube does not support all of the many many different video formats that are available, and for good reason. However, as a result, you should try to utilize a format such as mp4 or even mov. Most video editing software will support this but if yours does not, I would suggest downloading another program.

As for the size of your video, Youtube recommends 320*240 QVGA and I would also agree with this recommendation which, unless you are using a webcam, most often your camcorders will shoot at a higher resolution. You will need to resize the video but try not to effectively pull or stretch the frames.

When discussing which quality, or bit-rate, ideally you will be targeting a final file with a bit rate of 700-1000. I would suggest using 1000kbps, but anything higher is almost a waste as it does not result in much better quality and takes much more time to process.

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.

When you are done editing and exporting your video as a .mov or as a .mp4 format, you would obviously want to preview the video and make certain that it meets your standards for quality. If your resulting project is OK by you, go ahead and upload your video to Youtube.

Your video, depending on the speed of your internet connection, will take some time to upload and often several minutes. Once it is uploaded and resides on Youtube servers, they automatically compress and encode your video into an flv flash file. If you followed the suggestions for optimizing your video, your result should look much better than some others 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 to you and your video sharing success.

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