Every year most popular search engines releases the stats which are the compilation of the most searched queries of the year. All popular search engines on internet have released their own top search terms in this year, and they might be interesting for you.

If you own a website, it is always good to know what is popular and in trend at the given moment. If you react fast and provide some quality work, you will success. As 2010 comes to a close, it is time to check out which terms was the most popular in 2010.

Google Top Search Terms in 2010

Google’s top search engine terms is also known as Google Zeitgeist. There you can see some detailed stats about search engine terms on a global or a local areas.

Here are the 10 search queries that grew fastest in 2010 (UK):
1 Chatroulette
2 Formspring
3 Hotmail signin
4 ipad
5 justin bieber
6 worldcup 2010
7 fb
8 santander
9 youtube
10 metcheck

Top 10 Fastest-Rising People that grew fastest in 2010 (UK)
1 Kristian digby
2 justin bieber
3 nicki minaj
4 ellie goulding
5 alexander
6 mcqueen
7 kesha
8 miranda kerr
9 kim kardashian
10 katy perry

Yahoo! Top Search Terms in 2010

Yahoo is one of the most popular search engine today. Serving billions of search queries each year with thousands of satisfied users and members worldwide.

Here are top 10 most popular search queries in 2010 (UK):

1. Lottery
2. Job centre
3. Weather
4. Big Brother
5. Cheryl Cole
6. TV guide
7. World Cup
8. Train times
9. Katie Price
10. Horoscopes

Yahoo! has a great website which shows a whole Year in Review. Showing you the most popular trends and keywords from this search engine, allowing you to find some other good information.

Bing Top Search Engine Terms in 2010

The Bing is a web search engine from Microsoft and it is one of the three most popular search engines on internet. Let’s see which terms was the most popular in 2010 from this search engine.

The most popular overall search queries in 2010 (USA):

1 kim kardashian
2 sandra bullock
3 tiger woods
4 lady gaga
5 barack obama
6 hairstyles
7 kate goosselin
8 walmart
9 justin bieber
10 free

Most popular people searched in 2010 on Bing:

1. Kim Kardashian
2. Sandra Bullock,
3. Tiger Woods,
4. Lady Gaga
5. Barack Obama
6. Kate Gosselin
7. Justin Bieber
8. Jesse James
9. Lindsay Lohan
10. Jennifer Aniston
11. Michael Jackson

You can also see the most popular people searched in 2010 on Bing from their official blog. Interesting thing to notice there is that Kim Kardashian has received roughly 20% more searches than the second most popular search term on Bing in 2010.

Top 10 Search Terms on All Search Engines

So, let’s now look which are the most popular search engine terms on all search engines was in 2010. Including all above search engine query stats from Google, Yahoo and Bing.

Top 10 overall search engine terms in 2010:

1 Justin Bieber (Celebrity)
2 World Cup (Global event)
3 iPad (Apple’s gadget)
4 iPhone (Apple’s gadget)
5 Kim Kardashian (Celebrity)
6 Lady Gaga (Celebrity)
7 Chatroulette (Online service)
8 BP Oil Spill (Global event)
9 Megan Fox (Celebrity)
10 Swine Flu (Global event)

So, what we can learn from this? We have here 4 celebrities, 3 global events, 2 popular gadgets and 1 online service. So, we can guarantee that the most popular searches on internet in UK (and probably worldwide) are related to the celebrities. Following with global events, Apple products and online services.

“It’s quite normal for e-commerce sites to increase sales by 100% or more as a result of usability. More important, they can probably avoid 9 of 10 returns by eliminating most mis-designed items (a 1000% improvement of the error rate metric)”.
- Jakob Nielsen

“A report by Creative Good showed that 39 per cent of test shoppers failed in their buying attempts because sites were too difficult to navigate. Additionally, 56 per cent of search attempts failed”.
- Creative Good

“Fortune 1000 companies each spend an average of $2 million per year on site redesigns, without knowing if the redesign made the site easier to use”.
- Forrester Research

“The dumbest mistake is viewing design as something you do at the end of the process to ‘tidy up’ the mess, as opposed to understanding it’s a ‘day one’ issue and part of everything.”
- Tom Peters

“A bad web site is like a grumpy salesperson.”
- Jakob Nielsen

Why is it important?

If your visitors find your site but then can’t navigate it, use any of the functionality on it or find what they’re looking for, then they will leave empty handed and disappointed in you and your site. Need I say more?

Link to Usability papers:

Measuring the quality of eService
“By conducting exploratory factor analysis and structural equation modeling, we found that e-service quality is measured on six dimensions: information quality, website usability, reliability, responsiveness, assurance and personalization”.

Designing usable online stores: A landscape preference perspective
As an exploratory effort, we adopted and extended Kaplan’s landscape preference model by including factors of legibility, coherence, variety, and mystery, and examined their effect on cognitive and affective appraisals and their impact on purchase intention…Our ?ndings demonstrated that the proposed model explained a large amount of the variance of purchase intention, invariant across different subgroups.

A Usability Evaluation of the Business and Industry Web Site
“During September and October 2008, the Usability Lab tested 12 novice participants in a “one-click” usability study of two different versions of a low-fidelity prototype of the Business andIndustry main page. The page was developed by the current Economic Web Site RedesignTeam. The page did not have any clickable links, though it did include text that appeared to belinks. Participants were given a set of tasks and were asked to click on a link that they felt would best lead them to information that would answer the task question. The link did not takethe participant to another page— once the participant had clicked, the task was complete. Thestudy evaluated the success and satisfaction of the participants and whether the link theparticipants chose would have led them to the answer they were seeking”.

Usability Evaluation of Three Social Networking Sites

“This study evaluatedthe usability of three of the most popular social networking sites (MySpace,Facebook, and Orkut). Results revealed issues related to confusing terminology,inadequate feedback and error messages, and improper link location impacted user performance and satisfaction”.

Webpage aesthetics, performance, and usability:Design variables and their effects

“Fifty-seven design variables and ten underlying clusters that conceptualize the structure of user webpage judgement are identified through content analysis on literature and structured interviews, balanced incomplete block user survey administration, and cluster analysis.”

The Discussion on Influence of Website Usability towards User Acceptability

“From Web 1.0 to Web 2.0, the development of Internet technology makes the existing value of websites has revolutionary change. How to provide suitable service platform for human-machine interaction through websites is the subject of debate that many technology developers and users concern about nowadays. This study uses Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) as the foundation, from the perspective of tourism companies and Internet users to analyze the relevant
factors of website usability”.

Effects of Interactivity on Website Involvement and Purchase Intention

“This study aims to understand how website interactivity (active control and reciprocal communication) can impact purchase intention through website involvement and how the impacts are moderated by the type of products featured on websites”.

Technical Review: Current Issues of Usability Testing

“System usability can be measured through various methods. One of the more important and widely employed techniques is ‘usability testing’, where asks, number of users, evaluators, and other factors are the main elements. This paper reviews usability testing together with current issues that can influence usability testing results, both negatively and positively. It also reviews web usability testing. In addition, in this paper, usability testing in the future is considered in order that improvements may be made.”

Recuperating Website Link Structure Using Fuzzy Relations between the Content and Web Pages

“The link structure of website allows us to spread the link power of home page to the individual pages of the site. In this paper we define the content and web pages as two important and prominent factors in website navigation and restate the enhancement in the website navigation as making some useful changes in the link structure of the website based on the aforementioned factors. Then we suggest a new method for proposing the changes using fuzzy approach to optimize the website architecture.”

A Heuristic Based Approach for Improving Website Link Structure and Navigation

“As web sites evolve over time, their complexity in both the content and the link structure also tend to increase,hence, causing disorientation and cognitive overload on the user side. User traversals tend to become more cumbersome,and information get hidden deep inside long chains of web pages and links. As a result, we need more creative design features to allow automatic and dynamic improvement of web site link structure. This paper describes a set of heuristics to optimize the web site usability and link structure.”

RockMelt, which is launching in beta, is “challenging the conventional assumption that a browser is all about navigating pages.”

The company’s first blog post explains:

With RockMelt we’ve re-thought the user experience because a browser can and should be about more than simply navigating Web pages. Today, the browser connects you to your world. Why not build your world right into your browser?

Your friends are important to you, so we built them in. Now you’re able to chat, share that piano-playing-cat video everyone’s going to love, or just see what your friends are up to, regardless of what site you’re on. Your favorite sites are important to you, so we built them in too. Now you can access them from anywhere, without leaving the page you’re on. And RockMelt will tell you when something new happens.

On paper, RockMelt, which is built on Google’s Chromium open source browser project, looks intriguing. Consumption habits on the web have changed, and as we’ve seen in the mobile space, there are plenty of opportunities to create user experiences that allow consumers to interact with existing content and applications in new ways that are consistent with those changing consumption habits. From the looks of it, RockMelt is making a decent attempt to make using the internet and popular social networking services like Facebook a more seamless exercise.

Despite all this, it’s hard to see RockMelt gaining much mainstream traction any time soon. The browser market is highly-competitive and will be a very tough nut to crack. As a Facebook account is required to use RockMelt, the company has inherently limited its market to Facebook’s 500m registered users, and will have to convince them that there are no privacy issues with logging in to browse. Perhaps most importantly, history is not on RockMelt’s side. As others have noted, the makers of the Flock browser have done a good job making the browser more social but they haven’t been rewarded by the market for it.

At the end of the day, there is no doubt that, for many consumers, using the internet has become a ‘social’ experience. But it’s quite unclear whether or not there’s a need for an additional layer of ‘social’ at the browser level. Even for a billion-dollar behemoth like Google, browser market share is hard won. Reinventing the browsing experience, marketing that new experience and educating consumers will not be easy, nor will it be cheap.

RockMelt, which is launching in beta, is “challenging the conventional assumption that a browser is all about navigating pages.”

The company’s first blog post explains:

With RockMelt we’ve re-thought the user experience because a browser can and should be about more than simply navigating Web pages. Today, the browser connects you to your world. Why not build your world right into your browser?

Your friends are important to you, so we built them in. Now you’re able to chat, share that piano-playing-cat video everyone’s going to love, or just see what your friends are up to, regardless of what site you’re on. Your favorite sites are important to you, so we built them in too. Now you can access them from anywhere, without leaving the page you’re on. And RockMelt will tell you when something new happens.

On paper, RockMelt, which is built on Google’s Chromium open source browser project, looks intriguing. Consumption habits on the web have changed, and as we’ve seen in the mobile space, there are plenty of opportunities to create user experiences that allow consumers to interact with existing content and applications in new ways that are consistent with those changing consumption habits. From the looks of it, RockMelt is making a decent attempt to make using the internet and popular social networking services like Facebook a more seamless exercise.

Despite all this, it’s hard to see RockMelt gaining much mainstream traction any time soon. The browser market is highly-competitive and will be a very tough nut to crack. As a Facebook account is required to use RockMelt, the company has inherently limited its market to Facebook’s 500m registered users, and will have to convince them that there are no privacy issues with logging in to browse. Perhaps most importantly, history is not on RockMelt’s side. As others have noted, the makers of the Flock browser have done a good job making the browser more social but they haven’t been rewarded by the market for it.

At the end of the day, there is no doubt that, for many consumers, using the internet has become a ‘social’ experience. But it’s quite unclear whether or not there’s a need for an additional layer of ‘social’ at the browser level. Even for a billion-dollar behemoth like Google, browser market share is hard won. Reinventing the browsing experience, marketing that new experience and educating consumers will not be easy, nor will it be cheap.

Many new clients believe that climbing the rankings is down to technical tweaking of the website, when actually it’s hugely influenced by the number of inbound links to a site.

You see, search engines like Google look at what value the rest of the web places on a particular web property.

How often other relevant websites talk about a site and, crucially, link to it, is a far better way for an algorithm to determine which pages are going to be useful to searchers.

It’s going to place far more value on peer assessment than it does on the metadata you post up.

Think about it, when you search for ‘cheap laptops’, do you want to see what other people found useful or a list of websites that want to sell you laptops, cheap or otherwise?

Encouraging inbound links to your pages is crucial. If you build them, customers will come.

So how can you generate this elusive link juice for your site? Here are my top tips for beginners.

Strike all thoughts of link farms from your mind

Let’s get one thing straight, it isn’t about the sheer quantity of links to your website anymore. Search engines are cleverer than that, they want to see links from relevant and authoritative websites before they rocket you up the rankings.

Don’t shell out cash to some proxy link farm business thinking it will help. Some search engines, including the behemoth that is Google, will penalise your website if you’re caught relying on a farm.

At best they’re useless, at worst, they’re actively harmful.

Create valuable pages

The very best way to encourage inbound links is to fill your pages with valuable, useful, informative, interesting, relevant content. Simple, right?

One great way to do this is to set up a blog, allowing you to post guides, industry news and opinion pieces. If your posts are interesting then people will naturally link to them as they discuss, rebut or expand on your comments.

Sometimes, you’ll really strike gold with a post and it will go viral.

Articles that do so brilliantly are known as ‘link bait’, because people will want to link to them. There’s nothing sinister about deliberately posting such bait, it is simply that you’ve created something very popular.

In fact, it’s exceptionally difficult to do, even newspapers only manage it now and again.

You have to be interesting

I am really going off the saying ‘content is king’ because it just doesn’t convey enough.

Let’s be frank, what’s in my bin can be described as its ‘content’, but I want some pretty different ‘content’ in my sandwich.

Content isn’t king; that implies the churned out garbage of rewritten press releases and plagiarised copy is useful when it comes to SEO.

Relevant, interesting, valuable copy is king and it takes time and skill to create.

It could be a blog, it could be a series of videos, it could be some amusing game that goes viral. Just make it interesting. The web is full when it comes to barely literate ramblings.

Make industry friends

One key way to build inbound links to your pages is to place guest posts on other industry blogs and include links to your own website.

However, that is much, much harder than it sounds. Although you might think blogs are crying out for content, if you don’t have a reputation as an industry authority then no one will be that keen to carry your copy.

In fact, knowing the value of a link to your website, some powerful blogs will try to charge you money for carrying your post.

The best way to avoid this kind of situation is to make friends with the humans behind the blogs.

It shouldn’t be too hard to make industry friends – follow them on twitter, comment on their blogs and (best of all) corner them at conferences and buy them a beer.

Making friends in your industry will be rewarding because you’ll learn a lot in discussion with them, your finger will be more on the pulse of your sector and you’ll stand a much better chance of being invited to place articles on their blogs.

The internet is a social place, so be sociable.

Use the right anchor text

The anchor text that’s used to link to your site matters, so bear that in mind when you’re writing guest posts. Using relevant keywords reinforces your page’s relevance for that keyword.

Far too often you see ‘click here for more information’, when it could be something better like ‘book cheap flights’ or ‘compare car insurers’ or whatever it is you sell.

Don’t miss out on the chance to reiterate to the search engines just how relevant your pages are to those search terms.

This is also relevant when choosing headlines for posts on your own blog. People will probably link to your pages using your headline, so it’s worth including keywords there when you can.

Of course, don’t let your keywords spoil your headlines, they are the hook that encourages people to read and then share your content.

Make the most of your position

Not everyone reading this will be a business. You might be a charity, sports team, music act, comedian… Everyone is trying to promote themselves online these days.

If you are an organisation that people want to support then design a badge and ask people to place it on their sites. They’ll be happy to support you, it will drive up brand awareness and you’ll receive a link.

Corporations will find it harder to get people to give away space on their pages. But you could try running a competition, for example, and offer winners and runners up a chance to display a proud badge declaring their success.

Many new clients believe that climbing the rankings is down to technical tweaking of the website, when actually it’s hugely influenced by the number of inbound links to a site.

You see, search engines like Google look at what value the rest of the web places on a particular web property.

How often other relevant websites talk about a site and, crucially, link to it, is a far better way for an algorithm to determine which pages are going to be useful to searchers.

It’s going to place far more value on peer assessment than it does on the metadata you post up.

Think about it, when you search for ‘cheap laptops’, do you want to see what other people found useful or a list of websites that want to sell you laptops, cheap or otherwise?

Encouraging inbound links to your pages is crucial. If you build them, customers will come.

So how can you generate this elusive link juice for your site? Here are my top tips for beginners.

Strike all thoughts of link farms from your mind

Let’s get one thing straight, it isn’t about the sheer quantity of links to your website anymore. Search engines are cleverer than that, they want to see links from relevant and authoritative websites before they rocket you up the rankings.

Don’t shell out cash to some proxy link farm business thinking it will help. Some search engines, including the behemoth that is Google, will penalise your website if you’re caught relying on a farm.

At best they’re useless, at worst, they’re actively harmful.

Create valuable pages

The very best way to encourage inbound links is to fill your pages with valuable, useful, informative, interesting, relevant content. Simple, right?

One great way to do this is to set up a blog, allowing you to post guides, industry news and opinion pieces. If your posts are interesting then people will naturally link to them as they discuss, rebut or expand on your comments.

Sometimes, you’ll really strike gold with a post and it will go viral.

Articles that do so brilliantly are known as ‘link bait’, because people will want to link to them. There’s nothing sinister about deliberately posting such bait, it is simply that you’ve created something very popular.

In fact, it’s exceptionally difficult to do, even newspapers only manage it now and again.

You have to be interesting

I am really going off the saying ‘content is king’ because it just doesn’t convey enough.

Let’s be frank, what’s in my bin can be described as its ‘content’, but I want some pretty different ‘content’ in my sandwich.

Content isn’t king; that implies the churned out garbage of rewritten press releases and plagiarised copy is useful when it comes to SEO.

Relevant, interesting, valuable copy is king and it takes time and skill to create.

It could be a blog, it could be a series of videos, it could be some amusing game that goes viral. Just make it interesting. The web is full when it comes to barely literate ramblings.

Make industry friends

One key way to build inbound links to your pages is to place guest posts on other industry blogs and include links to your own website.

However, that is much, much harder than it sounds. Although you might think blogs are crying out for content, if you don’t have a reputation as an industry authority then no one will be that keen to carry your copy.

In fact, knowing the value of a link to your website, some powerful blogs will try to charge you money for carrying your post.

The best way to avoid this kind of situation is to make friends with the humans behind the blogs.

It shouldn’t be too hard to make industry friends – follow them on twitter, comment on their blogs and (best of all) corner them at conferences and buy them a beer.

Making friends in your industry will be rewarding because you’ll learn a lot in discussion with them, your finger will be more on the pulse of your sector and you’ll stand a much better chance of being invited to place articles on their blogs.

The internet is a social place, so be sociable.

Use the right anchor text

The anchor text that’s used to link to your site matters, so bear that in mind when you’re writing guest posts. Using relevant keywords reinforces your page’s relevance for that keyword.

Far too often you see ‘click here for more information’, when it could be something better like ‘book cheap flights’ or ‘compare car insurers’ or whatever it is you sell.

Don’t miss out on the chance to reiterate to the search engines just how relevant your pages are to those search terms.

This is also relevant when choosing headlines for posts on your own blog. People will probably link to your pages using your headline, so it’s worth including keywords there when you can.

Of course, don’t let your keywords spoil your headlines, they are the hook that encourages people to read and then share your content.

Make the most of your position

Not everyone reading this will be a business. You might be a charity, sports team, music act, comedian… Everyone is trying to promote themselves online these days.

If you are an organisation that people want to support then design a badge and ask people to place it on their sites. They’ll be happy to support you, it will drive up brand awareness and you’ll receive a link.

Corporations will find it harder to get people to give away space on their pages. But you could try running a competition, for example, and offer winners and runners up a chance to display a proud badge declaring their success.

For those of you who follow me on Twitter, you might have seen that I recently joined Foursquare, admittedly to try and find out what all the fuss was about.

In actual fact I think it could provide great value to a lot of businesses, as well as certain individuals trying to promote a cause or product.

What businesses is Foursquare good for?

In my opinion, Foursquare as a marketing platform is a total waste of time for the majority of businesses, as unlike Twitter the ability to target a specific niche audience without having already built a relationship with them is very difficult, because there is friction with adding new people (due to privacy concerns).

The obvious type of company that benefits from using Foursquare are the ones that have a physical location and are open to customers – such as a shop, a restaurant, or a theme park. Here are some examples of businesses currently running marketing campaigns on Foursquare.

The reason why these types of businesses have an advantage is because they can get leverage from Foursquare’s shout functionality to incentivise customers to tweet or update their Facebook statuses tagging the businesses name when they check in.

Many businesses including Dominos Pizza also run mayor incentive programmes on Foursquare, whereby the mayor of a business venue (the person who has visited a store the most times over a period of two months) receives a free gift, in Dominos’ case a free small pizza – this obviously encourages customer loyalty, promotes word of mouth and raises awareness of the brands name across customers social media profiles.

Another great thing about having your business on Foursquare is that you can see who has been checking in, which can help not only with audience profiling, but also when it comes to building up other social media profiles such as Twitter with real customers – and not just any customers, but the Gen-Y ones that are web & social savvy and can help to promote your brand online.

What individuals is Foursquare good for?

For most individuals on Foursquare, they’re there because it’s fun, competitive, and a way of telling your friends about the cool places you’ve been visiting. But for some individuals trying to promote their cause or build a personal brand Foursquare can be a great tool.

There are some great examples of musicians using Foursquare to promote their music and let their fans know where they are on tour and where they’re heading, and even travel bloggers using Foursquare to map out their travel routes visually for their blog readers to see.

Obviously, there are many privacy issues when it comes to personal Foursquare accounts, which is one of the major reasons that people are reluctant to join Foursquare, but as long as your sensible (ie. not registering your own home so that people can see when you’re out of the house!) then you should be safe.

For those of you who follow me on Twitter, you might have seen that I recently joined Foursquare, admittedly to try and find out what all the fuss was about.

In actual fact I think it could provide great value to a lot of businesses, as well as certain individuals trying to promote a cause or product.

What businesses is Foursquare good for?

In my opinion, Foursquare as a marketing platform is a total waste of time for the majority of businesses, as unlike Twitter the ability to target a specific niche audience without having already built a relationship with them is very difficult, because there is friction with adding new people (due to privacy concerns).

The obvious type of company that benefits from using Foursquare are the ones that have a physical location and are open to customers – such as a shop, a restaurant, or a theme park. Here are some examples of businesses currently running marketing campaigns on Foursquare.

The reason why these types of businesses have an advantage is because they can get leverage from Foursquare’s shout functionality to incentivise customers to tweet or update their Facebook statuses tagging the businesses name when they check in.

Many businesses including Dominos Pizza also run mayor incentive programmes on Foursquare, whereby the mayor of a business venue (the person who has visited a store the most times over a period of two months) receives a free gift, in Dominos’ case a free small pizza – this obviously encourages customer loyalty, promotes word of mouth and raises awareness of the brands name across customers social media profiles.

Another great thing about having your business on Foursquare is that you can see who has been checking in, which can help not only with audience profiling, but also when it comes to building up other social media profiles such as Twitter with real customers – and not just any customers, but the Gen-Y ones that are web & social savvy and can help to promote your brand online.

What individuals is Foursquare good for?

For most individuals on Foursquare, they’re there because it’s fun, competitive, and a way of telling your friends about the cool places you’ve been visiting. But for some individuals trying to promote their cause or build a personal brand Foursquare can be a great tool.

There are some great examples of musicians using Foursquare to promote their music and let their fans know where they are on tour and where they’re heading, and even travel bloggers using Foursquare to map out their travel routes visually for their blog readers to see.

Obviously, there are many privacy issues when it comes to personal Foursquare accounts, which is one of the major reasons that people are reluctant to join Foursquare, but as long as your sensible (ie. not registering your own home so that people can see when you’re out of the house!) then you should be safe.

If you can think of a relevant way to utilise video as part of your marketing then there’s every reason you should.

Research shows that audiences are extremely comfortable with the medium (YouTube alone makes up almost a quarter of Google search queries), it’s cheap to distribute, needn’t be expensive to produce and ranks highly in the SEO stakes.

If you run things properly, then video can drive a huge volume of traffic to your site.

Here are a few key practices to get you started…

Part of viral marketing may be pure luck, but that doesn’t mean you can’t optimise your existing and upcoming video for maximum links and viral spread.

There are any number of reasons that certain video content catches the wider public’s imagination and experiences rocketing traffic, but by and large successful viral videos conform to a few set criteria.

Be relevant

If you want to grab a few extra hits, then you need to be fast on your feet. If you have the capability to produce video quickly, then you can certainly hop on board with current trends or relevant news.

Just remember that this option needs to be quick-in, quick-out. Nothing dates faster than pop culture, so while it’s fine to reference and riff on what’s going on, remember that timing is of the essence.

Don’t leap on a bandwagon too late or overstay your welcome.

Be entertaining

Just because online video is a relatively new medium, that doesn’t mean you should disregard the rules of cinema. As with any other marketing stream, people want engaging and relevant content.

If you’re making a video, that means you need to add drama, tension or big laughs. It’s easy to create a video about your product, but if you go for the straight sell you’ll end up with the online equivalent of a 1950′s TV commercial.

Instead, take the reality TV route. Create a story and utilise product placement throughout.

Sell the situation and the characters, not just the product.

Be concise

YouTube recently announced plans to increase video length to fifteen minutes, but that doesn’t mean you have to fill that time. A 90 second video can be more effective than a ten minute epic so make sure you start editing even before you start rolling.

Put together a concise script and really think about the visual medium. A picture paints a thousand words, so you have an opportunity to convey your ideas quickly.

Generally speaking a viewer will start to lose interest around the three minute mark, so ditch any filler.

Be progressive

Something else to think about early on is the possibility of a sequel. Just because you won’t be vying with Spielberg come Oscar season, there’s no reason you can’t have a successful franchise.

If you plan things properly and work with a decent director then there’s no reason you can’t film several short episodes in a single sitting, maximising cost efficiency and giving you the chance to progress and develop your ideas and your brand identity, creating anticipation rather than trying an audience’s patience.

A successful series will add up to more views and a longer lasting return on your investment, so plan ahead.

Be searchable

Whenever you right copy or put together a campaign, you’ll be thinking about key words and compelling headlines and you should keep that in mind with video as well. A good title should be catchy and concise.

Video is often ranked highly by search engines as well, so make sure you frontload those key-words and offer value, consider using a question as a title. Overall, make sure you keep one eye on your customer research and target video accordingly.

Be clear

Finally, remember your CTAs.

Whatever you’re selling, make sure you emphasise it in the final frame, otherwise you could be left with a clever, shareable video that fails when it comes to sales.

You should brand your videos throughout with an on-screen bug, add calls to action whenever possible and make sure you optimise SEO in descriptions and tags when you upload your content.

Remember to make it easy for customers to click through to your site.

Above all, video is a creative medium.

Whatever your product, it’s usually best to keep a friendly tone of voice that isn’t too formal, and don’t be afraid to experiment or change your branding to suit the medium.

If you can present your product in a unique or amusing way then it will have a far greater chance of going viral.

If you can think of a relevant way to utilise video as part of your marketing then there’s every reason you should.

Research shows that audiences are extremely comfortable with the medium (YouTube alone makes up almost a quarter of Google search queries), it’s cheap to distribute, needn’t be expensive to produce and ranks highly in the SEO stakes.

If you run things properly, then video can drive a huge volume of traffic to your site.

Here are a few key practices to get you started…

Part of viral marketing may be pure luck, but that doesn’t mean you can’t optimise your existing and upcoming video for maximum links and viral spread.

There are any number of reasons that certain video content catches the wider public’s imagination and experiences rocketing traffic, but by and large successful viral videos conform to a few set criteria.

Be relevant

If you want to grab a few extra hits, then you need to be fast on your feet. If you have the capability to produce video quickly, then you can certainly hop on board with current trends or relevant news.

Just remember that this option needs to be quick-in, quick-out. Nothing dates faster than pop culture, so while it’s fine to reference and riff on what’s going on, remember that timing is of the essence.

Don’t leap on a bandwagon too late or overstay your welcome.

Be entertaining

Just because online video is a relatively new medium, that doesn’t mean you should disregard the rules of cinema. As with any other marketing stream, people want engaging and relevant content.

If you’re making a video, that means you need to add drama, tension or big laughs. It’s easy to create a video about your product, but if you go for the straight sell you’ll end up with the online equivalent of a 1950?s TV commercial.

Instead, take the reality TV route. Create a story and utilise product placement throughout.

Sell the situation and the characters, not just the product.

Be concise

YouTube recently announced plans to increase video length to fifteen minutes, but that doesn’t mean you have to fill that time. A 90 second video can be more effective than a ten minute epic so make sure you start editing even before you start rolling.

Put together a concise script and really think about the visual medium. A picture paints a thousand words, so you have an opportunity to convey your ideas quickly.

Generally speaking a viewer will start to lose interest around the three minute mark, so ditch any filler.

Be progressive

Something else to think about early on is the possibility of a sequel. Just because you won’t be vying with Spielberg come Oscar season, there’s no reason you can’t have a successful franchise.

If you plan things properly and work with a decent director then there’s no reason you can’t film several short episodes in a single sitting, maximising cost efficiency and giving you the chance to progress and develop your ideas and your brand identity, creating anticipation rather than trying an audience’s patience.

A successful series will add up to more views and a longer lasting return on your investment, so plan ahead.

Be searchable

Whenever you right copy or put together a campaign, you’ll be thinking about key words and compelling headlines and you should keep that in mind with video as well. A good title should be catchy and concise.

Video is often ranked highly by search engines as well, so make sure you frontload those key-words and offer value, consider using a question as a title. Overall, make sure you keep one eye on your customer research and target video accordingly.

Be clear

Finally, remember your CTAs.

Whatever you’re selling, make sure you emphasise it in the final frame, otherwise you could be left with a clever, shareable video that fails when it comes to sales.

You should brand your videos throughout with an on-screen bug, add calls to action whenever possible and make sure you optimise SEO in descriptions and tags when you upload your content.

Remember to make it easy for customers to click through to your site.

Above all, video is a creative medium.

Whatever your product, it’s usually best to keep a friendly tone of voice that isn’t too formal, and don’t be afraid to experiment or change your branding to suit the medium.

If you can present your product in a unique or amusing way then it will have a far greater chance of going viral.