For years experts have been talking about how video is the future. Video marketing on the web is not the future anymore. It’s the present, and if you are not taking advantage of viral videos to drive more customers to your business, you are seriously missing the boat. Video marketing can not only get your business exposure on YouTube and other top video sites, it can also get you some extra hits from search engines. So if you are not taking time to develop a real video strategy for your business, you should re-think your strategy. With that in mind, if you are ready to start making your own promotional videos, here are 7 places that you can submit them to:

YouTube: YouTube doesn’t need any introduction. Your videos will most likely get the most hits on YouTube, and the search engines will bring even more traffic to your videos if you optimize your videos.

Viddler: Viddler is made for those who are looking to create branded videos. The pro plans can be pricey, but the service is well worth the investment if you are into vlogging. The prices are not that bad if you are getting real results with you videos. Great for web shows too.

Vimeo: Vimeo is one of the best alternatives to YouTube. In fact, many professionals use Vimeo to share their videos with the world. It may not get as much traffic as YouTube, but I found it easier to work with. Many businesses are using Vimeo as a way to give demo of their products or communicate with their customers.

DailyMotion: yet another underrated video sharing website. There are a lot of European videos on the site, but that doesn’t mean you can’t use this service to get more impressions for your videos. You can also partner up with DailyMotion and get rolling with MotionMakers program. In that case, you can expect your videos to be promoted by DailyMotion.

MetaCafe: MetaCafe was one of the first videos sites that started compensating video producers. Video makers who had their content go popular on MetaCafe were somewhat compensated for their work. MetaCafe is community driven, so make sure your videos are high quality and useful or the community will let you have it.

Veoh: Veoh has been around for years. It’s a platform for business professionals and all other types of publishers to get their work in front of Veoh’s community. Once you upload your video, you are going to have the opportunity to use the tools available to promote your videos.

TubeMogul: one of the best ways to keep track of your videos and their performance across popular video sharing websites. All you have to do is make a killer video, upload it to TubeMogul, and let the service upload your videos to top video sharing sites. It definitely saves time.

What’’s your favorite video sharing site for business?

In case you haven’t noticed, Google Wave has been taking the web by storm. Google Wave is a new tool by one of the most innovative companies in the world that is expected to change the way we communicate with our friends, customers, and everyone in between. Wave is e-mail on steroids. The e-mail system has been around for a while, but the technology is somewhat outdated for this day and age. Not when you can share videos, audio files, and other type of files with your friends. Not when conversations are more dynamic. Not when Twitter is around.

Google Wave is not that different what you have come to see on e-mail and social media sites. It’s just a combination of everything. It facilitates rich communications with your contacts. You can extend what you see on Google Wave through robots, gadgets, and other extensions. Think about it. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could receive your tweets on a Wave and be able to respod to invidual tweets right there?  How about using your Wave account to allow multiple people to tweet on the behalf of your company? How about adding gadgets that keep you informed on information that matter to you on a daily basis. That’s all possible using Google Wave.

Continue reading Google Wave for Small Business – Part I: Intro

The social media world is expanding fast. Just a few months ago, there were a lot of people who were skeptical about Twitter and Facebook. Now you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who hasn’t heard of these services. There are plenty of ways to start a business on these sites. If you take time to get yourself familiar with the API offered by Twitter and Facebook, you can create real solutions that people want to use. You obviously have to identify a need and provide value with your service, but these APIs can be easily utilized to create killer products for social media sites such as Twitter.

Twitter is growing really fast, which is why starting a Twitter-based business makes sense these days. If you know someone who knows the API or can hire someone to write code for you, the sky’s the limit on what products you can make for Twitter. Here are 10 Twitter business ideas to get you started:

• Local Services: creating geo-based Twitter solutions is nothing new. But the market is still not saturated. No matter where you are around the world, you can create a Twitter-based service and attract Twitter users in your area. Or you can go for it all and create a craigslist-like service for Twitter.
• Status Update: creating a software solution that makes it easy to update multiple social media accounts in one shot is still one of the best ways to gain some traction in this business (e.g. Pinging service).
• Desktop Clients: we have over a dozen of desktop clients that let tweeters tweet from their PC more effectively. At the same time, there is always room for innovation in this area (TweetDeck).
• Analytics Tools: social media analytics is gaining traction slowly and more people will use SM analytics solutions to measure ROI for their social media campaigns. The sky’s the limit in this area. You can go for simple, freemium services or create premium analytics solution (with the proper investment).
• Automation Tools: there are a lot of businesses and individuals that prefer automating parts of their social media campaigns. Targeting them could be lucrative (TweetAdder).
• Account Management Tools: letting people manage their account more efficiently on Twitter is yet another way to make money on Twitter. Though make sure you figure out your business model before going online (Hootsuite).
• Mobile Apps: offering a mobile solution for iPhone, Android, and other top mobile platforms is yet another way to build business on Twitter. It’s not as hard as it looks as long as you have the right developers.
• International Twitter Solutions: have you seen tweeters who talk in foreign languages on Twitter? Wouldn’t it be nice if you could develop a solution for them to help them tweet and connect with others more effectively (e.g. a Twitter translation service)?
• Twitter Training: what if you don’t want to write code? You can still make money on Twitter by letting others know how to get started on Twitter. You can also offer backgrounds, buttons, and all kinds of little solutions and monetize on the side.
• Twitter Portals: if you are into building content portals, why not use Twitter to build more dynamic ones? Lots of content to take advantage of.

As you can seen, building a business on Twitter is not that hard. You obviously do want to pay attention to business 101 concepts, but as long as you identify a need that is not being addressed in your niche, there are plenty of opportunities to make money on Twitter.

Your take: please share your Twitter ideas here.