Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll have noticed that videos are appearing more and more in the search results.

Despite the conspiracy theories, this isn’t some plot by Google to give themselves extra space in the search results.

It’s because – in general – people are clicking on videos in the search results and watching them.

Video doesn’t work for all businesses – if there are no YouTube videos on the first 3 or 4 pages of the results, it’s worth thinking again about the phrase that you’ve chosen.

But if a YouTube video appears on page 1, 2 or 3 (or often several videos, spread out amongst those search results) then you should strongly consider creating your own video.

It’s not actually difficult once you get the hang of it.

The software I suggest is called Screencast-o-matic.

You can try it for free and you only need to pay the very low annual subscription if you want to get rid of the small watermark and do a few extra things with the software.

Either way it’s a bargain.

The software will record what you’re doing on screen – perfect for demos of websites and programs. But it also works for recording Powerpoint presentations.

It will also record your voice.

And don’t worry, near enough everyone hates the recorded sound of their own voice. That doesn’t matter!

Or you can record your webcam – great for adding personality to your videos.

Either way, you need to come up with a short script or at least an outline of what you’re going to cover in your video.

There’s no “set” length on YouTube although your account with them may limit the maximum amount of time a video can last until you build up trust with YouTube at which stage they will upgrade your account to allow videos of any length.

That said, even the regular limit is fine.

As a general rule, you should aim for a video to be between 1 and 10 minutes long.

That’s a wide range but that’s because I don’t know what subject you’re going to be recording about or how much detail you’re going to go into.

But if your video appears to be getting longer than that, stop and record part two (and three, four, etc)

Once your video is recorded, you need to get it turned into a format that you can upload to YouTube.

There are several different formats but the one I normally use is MP4.

It takes a short while for Screencast-o-matic to do this, so go off and grab a coffee or do something else on your computer while that happens.

Once that’s done, sign in to your YouTube page, click the upload button and fill in the various other boxes.

The most important boxes are the video title – treat it with the same importance as a web page title (which means highly important) – and the description.

Treat the description like a page on your website and include a link to a relevant page on your website at least once in the description.

Use more links if it’s a long description, which is preferable.

And, yes, I know, not all the videos on my YouTube channel do that. But they should.

Then click the publish button, followed by the link to your video just to make sure it’s uploaded OK.

You can do this as often as you like.

And it really helps with marketing your business. Not just on YouTube but elsewhere on the web as well.

Make your videos of benefit to your customers and potential customers. Not blatant commercials!

You can also use the code that YouTube gives you to “embed” the videos you’ve uploaded on your own site. YouTube encourage you to do this and it helps in quite a lot of different ways so it’s worth doing.

Here’s a video I did to explain more about this:

And feel free to add your comments about video marketing below.