posted by Mark

Recently, we posted an article pointing out that YouTube – with more than a billion daily hits – had effectively become the world's second-largest search engine. But as much as we'd love to take sole credit for the idea, it seems that we aren't the only ones who noticed.

It’s difficult to find solid numbers, but estimates suggest that users are adding more than 200,000 new videos every single day, or about 13 hours worth each minute. While lots of those undoubtedly involve house pets dancing to modern hits, many of the new additions are coming from savvy online marketers just like you... and the trend is only gaining strength.

Here at Blue Beetle, it reminds us of something.

It wasn't that long ago that regular old search engine optimization was the hot new thing. Companies had just started figuring out that fresh content was the key to working your way to the top of Google, Yahoo, and MSN (now Bing), and so they got into a mad rush to add articles to their websites. In many cases, this was a great thing, because it brought valuable information to the Internet. But just as often that meant marketers who were trying to make a quick buck posted poorly-written collections of key words they called articles, making it difficult for searchers to actually find the useful pages they were looking for.

The same thing is beginning to happen on YouTube. For all of the wonderful advice and entertainment that has already been uploaded, we are starting to see badly-produced videos coming from marketers looking to take shortcuts. A few of them might find a way to make money from this strategy, but it's bound to fail in the long term because people don't go online looking for junk—they're searching for quality advice and insight.

With that in mind, we are going to tell you something you probably already know: the goal of your video marketing campaign shouldn't be to have the most YouTube videos, but the most effective. Post material that educates and entertains, not clips that take up a few minutes while parroting your sales message again and again.

One good video on YouTube can bring you millions of views and thousands of new customers, but a badly done piece only costs everyone time and aggravation.