U-Tube to drive traffic

I have a gambling site which is difficult to promote because the keywords (roulette, UK online casinos etc) are very popular and therefore extremely expensive in PPC.

I’ve noticed some u-tube videos showing in search result that are basically ads for competitor sites. My question is how can you use u-tube to promote your site? Has anyone tried, and is it effective?

Never tried it but everyone has the same thing in common. Produce a video like you would a blog, make the content unique or something unusual. This will mean people will view it and therefore increase potential hits to your site.

The only thing you can do i try and see what works.

A friend of mine promotes websites primarily through videos and video hosting sites like youtube.

Click the "my youtube channel" link for examples. The traffic is very targeted, more so then generic search traffic off of google. If someone finds my site from youtube, they are around 60% more likely to create an account then if they found my site off google.

Traffic off of youtube is not instant, but it well worth investing into. Once you have your videos made, then you can start posting them to different sites such as dailymotion and yahoo video.

I have used youtube and if you make interesting videos you can expect to increase hits substantially. They need to be good though or else they are worthless for hits.

Currently my website matthewseymour.co.uk is recieving around 100 unique hits a day. Over the next few days I am going to create some youtube videos and see how they increase hits on my website. It will be interesting to see the percentage change.

I will keep you all posted about the results I gather.

Matt - Please do let me know how you get on. If it works I would be interested in trying too - so anything you learn will be v useful. Cheers!

I am going to try and create some sort of video for my site...I will post back here with any effect on traffic that it may have. Hopefully lots!

Any stories of success or failure would be most welcome!

I once used youtube to promote a website about a new up and coming band, the youtube video created was some of their new tracks but we also created a video where by we asked viewers to come up with a new name for the upcoming album as a sort of competition with the winner receiving £100.

The chance of a prize made more people than expected join in, they had to visit the website for further details and to submit their idea. On the same page we had tracks for sale and a signup area to be told of future song releases etc.

Over then next 3 weeks the site received 4 times the traffic it had done previously and we made much more than £100 in track sales so it more than paid for the competition prize.

The track sales weren't the most important aspect though as the main aim was to greatly increase the word about the band and we increased the member list hugely many of which have since purchased tickets to the gigs, tracks and albums.

Im not sure what you could do for a gambling site but for other websites you could easily create related videos, for example a fitness website which sells information and videos on keeping fit could put some samples on youtube to get people heading to the website for the full videos.

All the best.

Thanks for the good advice. And its good to hear the success you had for the band website.

For gambling sites you can create a video showing how to play certain games well, how to follow a roulette or backjack strategy etc.

Sorry I originally thought you had a gambling site like william hill etc.

If you have a tips and strategy site then there are loads of videos you can do. You could post a series of samples which don't give away everything but just enough that the viewer is interested and thinks the site could be of use to them.

Yes - I will try some tips videos. The challenge is making it genuinely interesting and unique, but I have some ideas there. Watch this space.