The lights have dimmed and cooled. The unwanted bits are on the editing room floor and you’re ready to take your video masterpiece and show it to the masses on Internet. But just as you breathe that sigh of relief you realize you don’t know how best to get those people to your video. So here are some quick tips on how to do just that.

The first thing you need to do is to make sure your video is easy to find. That not only means getting it up on the web but also putting in keywords, descriptions and tags. All of this added information will make your video easier to spot not only in the search engines but also via the video sharing site itself. By using only a choice selection of appropriate keywords and a proper description it will help people find your video themselves. Additionally the search engines will be better able to classify your content so when people search for your keywords you’ll float to the top like the cream of the crop.

RSS is another great way to get your content quickly indexed by the search engines. If you’re uploading your videos to your own site with your own content management system (CMS) then it probably has a built in RSS feed that you can take the link and submit to search engines. Places like Blinkx, Yahoo and Truveo will accept an RSS or MRSS feed which will tell them when you upload something new. Google Video requires a video sitemap which is also easy enough to do with a little research.

Availability is also a key issue in getting your in front of viewers and so you need to submit to as many sites as you can if you’re using video sharing and video platforms. There are multiple pieces of software that can upload one video to a range of sites automatically so you don’t need to do a lot of extra work. A good list of those tools can be found over at ReelSEO. They have a range of articles on both video sharing platforms and mutliple upload tools.

If you’re uploading video to your own site and not to a video sharing site you’ll really need to do more work to get people to your videos. RSS and sitemaps are a great start but you also have to get your viewers to share your video content with their friends. That’s where social networking links come in. Places like YouTube and such have them built into the sites already but if you’re running your own site you might need to find either a plugin for your site or just a bit of code to drop in for them.

Have a Facebook profile? What about a fan page? If not then that’s something you need to get to work on. There are companies out there like R2 Relations that will build your presence out on the social networks or you can do it yourself. Another great idea is maintaining a periodic newsletter to alert people or remind them about your content every so often. At the very least you need a presence on the most popular social networking sites like Facebook, Myspace and Twitter.

Even though your video is done, the quest for an online audience is just beginning. There are services that you can use or if you’re the hands-on type you can do it all yourself just by researching what it is you need to do. Hopefully this has got you on the right track and you’ll have people talking about and watching your video content soon.

You know youve done it. Youre part of the YouTube generation and youve not only watched videos but uploaded them as well. Once you did that though you realized the quality of your video just sucked. You tried a variety of things and still arent happy with the quality.

So heres the skinny on what you need to do to get your videos to be all they can be on YourTube without massive headaches, expensive hardware and Hollywood-sized editing budgets. The following are the major points to take into account prior to uploading your videos.

Resolution ” Lets face it, YouTube is now HD Ready like the latest LCD and Plasma televisions. So that means you need to adapt to their system in order to get them to play nice. Their native resolution? Its 720p, a 1280×720 pixels of resolution. Its HD quality, so youll need a video source that can handle it if you want HD quality videos. When you save that video for YouTube make sure you do that in 1280×720 and YouTubes compressor will love you for it and reward you with some better quality and give you the luxury of having a watch in HD link on your videos.

Bitrate ” Without getting into the technical mumbo jumbo, this is how much information each second of your video is. The more information means the better quality generally. So when youre making your video, editing or converting youll want to get this to somewhere around 6 Megabits-per-second and 8 Megabits-per-second. This will give you a large file size that should fit into the YouTube limits (1GB) and still give you ample quality after the YouTube compression process. This is a good way to make sure your video will retain some semblance of what it looked like when you made it.

There are several other factors that you should think about here as well. The Codec, software that encodes your video to a particular format, for YouTube that is .mov or .mp4 so make sure you have it in that. If you dont youre going to need a piece of video editing software like Quicktime Pro, Premier, or some other software on the market with multiple file format compatibility. Audio should be set in 44.1KHz Stereo MP3 or AAC format on your video and finally get your framerate at 30fps or higher to make sure theres not a lot of jitter and jumps.

Once youve got all this, upload your video, wait for YouTube to process it and you should a nice looking video pushed out to the site for your friends, family and complete strangers. Good Luck in your video marketing efforts.