Brilliant programme from Five’s The Gadget Show with their top 5 apps for mobile phones.

Qik offers opportunities for both businesses and politicians. So your having a store opening, product or policy launch, wanting to highlight a key local issue. With Qik.com you can get your message straight on-line from your mobile phone.

Currently the number of phone models supported is extremely limited, however the ability to live stream from your mobile offers huge possibilities to marketers and politicians to launch their campaigns and share messages.

Currently the site is being very sensible, like many web 2.0 sites they are controlling the numbers that sign up and you have to apply for access, however its clear that a site of this type will be hugely popular in a world increasingly wanting to stream what they are up to. No doubt this or other similar site will capture the imagination of millions of users if not some very interesting content (!!).

By adding live video to a service such as this you further extend the audience for your messages and give further opportunities to influence search results.

Even if you have video on your own website you should also put this content on YouTube. By doing this YouTube users will find your content during YouTube searches, an audience you would otherwise miss.

YouTube places a restriction on file size. Your videos can be up to 100MB for standard upload or up to 1GB using the YouTube Uploader.

Your video cannot be longer than 10 minutes (there is no way around this and your upload will fail).

File formats suitable for YouTube include .WMV, .AVI, .MOV, and .MPG transferred from most digital cameras, camcorders, and cell phones.

When creating your video you should place the URL of your site and the start and end of the video (not everyone will watch the whole video).

If you have a company logo if possible add this as a watermark throughout the video. You should try and ensure this is unobtrusive but it is useful to include as if someone edits or takes a snapshot of your video a connection to your brand will be retained.

Think about how your video will be viewed out of context, when others place your video within their site they may not include any description that you place in YouTube.

Edit the sharing options. I recommend enabling comments after you have reviewed them. This is purely to stop offensive comments and should not be used to stop critical debate. Do allow others to embed your video into their page

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Shortly after adding your video you will find that the content will appear in standard search results on sites such as Google (who own YouTube) again spreading your message to a wider audience.

As your video is now suitable to go anywhere think about also adding your content to Facebook by creating a Facebook page.

Benefits for search
You already have a website, you may have a Facebook page, both of which will help the public find you on search engines such as Google and Yahoo! However without content on YouTube, YouTubers using the YouTube search box will either find no content about you – or possibly worse – only content created about you by your opponents. Once you have created your YouTube Channel you should link to it from your website which will help ensure it will be picked up by search engines and very soon could result in your videos appearing in the main search results on the key search engines.

Where do I start?
To start adding video’s to YouTube you need to create a channel. To create a channel you simply sign up to YouTube. When doing this it is important to note your YouTube username cannot be changed after it has been created. It will appear on your channel so think carefully about what you use as a username.

Do my videos have to be high qualitiy?
The most important issue with creating YouTube video’s is ensuring the viewer can hear the message. Beware of background noise when recording the videos. The quality is not a major priority – in fact if your video is too polished it would look out of place in the YouTube environment. There is a limit to the size of your videos on YouTube which is a maximum of 10 minutes in length and a file size of 1024 MB (if you keep you video to 2 – 3 minutes you will not have to be concerned about file size, you will need to use the multi video uploader for videos over 100MB ). You could customise your video’s using video editing software, adding titles etc. this could be something you go on to at a later date and should not be a barrier to starting your channel.

Adding videos to YouTube
After you record your videos, select ‘upload videos’ then enter a title, description and ‘tags’. The content of these fields are important as this will help influence where you appear in YouTube searches. It is essential that you set up the ‘sharing options’ selecting for comments and video comments to be allowed after you approve them. Whilst you want to get responses from viewers you will want to filter any messages that are purely abusive without any substance.

For step by step guide to uploading a video to YouTube visit their how to pages.

How many videos should I add?
There is no limit to the number of videos, I would start with at least three video’s. Keep your video’s short, creating separate video’s for each video.

What next?
You will be able to monitor how many times your video’s are viewed, see who is linking to your video or make it a favourite on their YouTube account. YouTubers can subscribe to your channel, where any new video’s you add will appear when they log into their homepage.

You can help visitors to your YouTube Channel find related content by finding related content on YouTube and selecting these as your favourites and subscribing to other channels.