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Recently I had a friend, who is an independent film maker, approach me about promoting his creations online.

He’s part of a new breed of content creator.  One who prefers to try to promote his vision of things without the help of “traditional” services like agents and studios.

In fact, the whole area of self publishing and promoting your own content is one that is rapidly expanding.  But what I found in helping him is that there are other areas of the web which could also be commercialized to a certain extent.

Technology is amazing.  I mean, here’s this guy I’ve never met before, yet who I would consider a friend (but that’s a whole other story), asking my advice on promoting his videos.

Videos which he has produced with others which they want to distribute at a grassroots level.

You see, these guys were able to scrape together enough money to get together decent editing equipment and good video cameras but that’s about all they have.  They all have regular jobs, so this is a hobby that they hope they can also turn into a career.

Their first thoughts were “well lets throw up a website and promote them through there.” And this is what you’d typically do, except that the engines today (Google in particular) are notoriously bad for letting a new site show up in search results.

Upon explaining this to my friend he then asked what else there was to do.  Immediately I thought of Google Video.  After all, it’s movies you create, not websites, so why not use other areas of Google to promote it?

So we did some checking and sure enough, submitting to Google Video was quite easy, so we began looking for other places to submit the videos to.

Within a matter of minutes my friend came up with other great sources as well:  Ifilm, Youtube and Vmix to name just a few.

Of course, my first thought was “hey this is an entire market that’s not being tapped well for commercial purposes.”

Now before you go saying “but I can’t film all my products” let me qualify by saying this tactic will only work for certain types of online businesses.

For example, video promotion might work excellent for introduction services, automobile sales, real estate and other big ticket items, and those sorts of businesses.  Something where a video will work better than a picture.

Let’s look at the introduction site as an example.

Rather than merely posting photos of the people using your services, why not also allow them to post short videos of themselves talking?.  Then the videos can be submitted to the services listed above.

Most of the services allow for instant uploading and viewing of the videos – the only exception is Google where the video has to be screened for content first, but that only takes 3 or 4 days and then the video is live and searchable.

And the best part of this is that the videos can take advantage of some optimization. Well, not so much the videos themselves, but the services which host the videos allow you to provide searchable descriptions and even tag them in some cases.

Imagine that – for a small fee, your introduction company could submit your clients videos online to reach even more audience.

Another great thing is that, using these services, you don’t need to host the videos on your own site.  Therefore there’s no real cost involved with either the space required to hold the videos or the bandwidth required to stream them.  All you would have to do is post the link to the videos on one of the sites.

In fact, with Google you can embed the Google player right on your site if you want your visitors to view the video from there.  Also, if you desire, Google Video allows you to download the video – even to an iPod.

And like I said, while I’m using an introduction service as an example, why couldn’t you do it for an auto dealer, or realtor?  Imagine being able to showcase a vehicle or better yet a home for sale on a video?  Any good salesman knows that a video will sell better than a picture.

The best part of all this is the video hosting is free – all you need to do is take the video, write a good description for it and upload it.

So, do you want to know how powerful this could be for you?

My friend uploaded a short film to Youtube 2 weeks ago.  It’s already had well over 200 views. And I know the Google video has had tons of exposure as well - getting over 500 views in the past 2 weeks.

So if your products are those which could benefit from such exposure, consider other sites, like video sites, to help promote them.

Rob Sullivan is a SEO Consultant and Writer for Textlinkbrokers.com