I do a little bit of everything when it comes to marketing my sites: (1) video marketing (2) social network marketing (3) bookmark marketing (4) RSS marketing (5) paid marketing (6) search engine marketing, etc. Some of the above marketing would be classified as viral marketing (marketing by spreading the word - i.e. video marketing, bookmark marketing, etc) Recently I wrote a blog about video marketing. This is a follow up or part 2 of that blog with more discussion about youtube.
 
As a minimum for video marketing you should:
 
1. Create a video or use images with special effects to create a video. There are tons of video software. Even windows comes with their own version of video editing software, however, if you want to search out more options check out www.download.com. You could also use some of the online sites to do your video/image creation. I use http://animoto.com/
 
2. Keywords for your video marketing is as important is it is for marketing your site for search engines. The beauty of video marketing is that your video could be indexed by google so those who are searching for online dating sites, could find your video in their search results as well as it being found when searching on youtube. If you are not familiar with the importance of keywords, STOP, do nothing else until you did some research otherwise your marketing efforts will be a waste of time. The best place to research is google -- try these SEARCH RESULTS or visit some of the more popular marketing/webmaster forums like Digital Point or Sitepoint.
 
3. Audio can make or break a video. I usually use music with my videos. You have to be careful because of copyright violations, however, there is a little test you can do to see if the music you want to use with your video is acceptable on youtube. What I do is search youtube for the music I want to use. If it is already on youtube, than good chance that you can use it in your video.
 
4. Make sure to render your video in a format acceptable for uploading to youtube. I’m not going to go over video formats since all the instructions for formatting and uploading video to youtube is posted on youtube site.
 
5. If you have a good audio editor, consider enhancing the audio before merging with your video. If you download your audio from the net or youtube, the sound quality and volume will be low. A good audio editor can improve the sound quality. I usually edit the audio and increase the sound for my videos knowing that when I upload my videos to youtube, they will convert the audio to mono.
 
Search Engines
 
Ultimately you want all your marketing efforts to somehow be recognized by search engines (i.e. google). Recently google announced it is going to start indexing content from twitter, and facebook sites. When I read the announcement, I realized how RSS marketing could play an important role in adding content to my twitter and facebook accounts to be indexed by google (I wrote about RSS at vldForum). Currently, as I write this, google has indexed images, content and video from all my sites to be found when using keyword searches related to online dating. However, content is still the number one search criteria for my sites and probably the most important.
 
Revenue Sharing
 
Many people who are good at making popular videos get paid for uploading their videos to youtube -- called Revenue Sharing. Recently I got an email from youtube asking me if I wanted to join their Revenue Sharing program. My videos are far from being so popular that they will make a lot of money, but it is nice to know they are popular enough to be found by others. My main reasons for uploading videos is to drive traffic to my sites. If I’m lucky, my videos may be embedded on other sites to help spread the word (viral marketing) and increase traffic.
 

 
Every Little Bit Helps
 
With my niche, I have to rely on an accumulative effort rather than putting all my eggs in one basket for my marketing campaigns. If I focused on one marketing campaign, I doubt if my results would be very good or at least it would take quite some time before I saw any substantial traffic for my efforts. Instead, I focus on doing many things with the hope that each marketing campaign will contribute to the overall accumulative effort of bringing good traffic to my sites. So far it has worked out well. I highly recommend video marketing but don’t make it your only marketing effort, but one of many marketing campaigns to help bring traffic to your vldPersonal site.
 
Good Luck!