Jimm Fox over at One Market Media has written a close to definitive post on about all the ways possible to use video to promote and grow your business. He didn’t just list them; he added explanation for each of the 42 ways. Fantastic post!

Puzzled about using video in your business? How might it work? This post from Jimm will give you context and plenty of ideas. I’ve printed it out and will use it with clients from now on.

As Mark Robertson over at ReelSEO commented, I’m not so sure on the basis of the popularity and growth potential comments, but they are mostly accurate to my eye and the rest of the information listed there is pure gold.

I’ve summarized the 42 ways below here – but I encourage you to check out both articles for more!

Customer Reference Videos
1. Video Customer Testimonials
2. Video Success Stories
3. Video Case Study
4. Man-in-the-street Interviews
5. Customer Presentations.

Product and Service Promotions
6. Product Presentations
7. Product Demonstrations
8. Product Reviews
9. Visual Stories

Corporate Videos
10. Corporate Overview
11. Executive Presentations
12. Staff Presentations
13. Corporate facilities or equipment tour

Training and Support Videos
14. Training
15. Overnight expert videos
16. Just-in-time learning
17. Post sale support and maintenance videos

Internal Communications Videos
18. Internal Communications
19. Event/Conference and Trade Show Communications
20. Employee orientation
21. Health, Legal & Safety

Advertising, Marketing and Promotion
22. Commercials
23. Viral Video
24. Email Video
25. Infomercials
26. Content Marketing
27. Landing pages and micro sites

PR Support and Community Relations
28. Video Press Releases
29. PR Support Materials
30. Community Relations Video

Event Video
31. Event Presentation video
32. Round table Sessions
33. Q&A Expert sessions

Other Uses of Video
34. Recruitment Videos
35. VLOG
36. In Store Video
37. Company Lobby / Waiting Room Video
38. Mobile Video
39. Market research, focus groups and polling
40. Website FAQ Video
41. Video White paper
42. Video Magazine

As an added example (for inspiration), WIND Mobile just passed another hurdle to create another national mobile telephone provider here in Canada… Good on them! Here’s one of their excellent videos from YouTube… this one cracks me up.

[mc src="http://www.youtube.com/v/GAm6MTtu3KA" type="youtube"]Wind Mobile Video[/mc]

• Broadcast media starts to really show the strain that it’s time to “adapt or die” – many newspaper, radio and TV stations have changed hands or sadly, closed.

• M$ launches Bing, which is better than expected and then yesterday… a kick ass map site to compete with Google Maps.

• Google signals repeatedly that Local Search is very very important – Place Pages, Local Ad testing, LBC 10 pack down to a 5 Pack (!) in testing, social search integration, etc.

• Online Video accelerates into “rather steep-ish” growth – approximately straight up! Cisco releases their findings that 90% of all web traffic is from online video.

Mark Robertson of one of my fav sites, ReelSEO did a fabulous presentation at SES San Jose looking at the year in review…

Here’s the Slides from his talk – these are a treasure trove of great resources!

The opportunity lies in the amount of people who are watching video on YouTube. On YouTube your video has the ability to reach more people, quicker than any other video distribution site.

The challenge is in standing out from the sheer volume of hundreds of videos posted to YouTube every hour, of every day.

If you’re fortunate enough to have a video go viral, the amount of traffic and business you can get could power your company for many months. The majority of videos do not reach this holy grail of marketing, so the effective strategy is to promote your video on YouTube to gain both the most viewers, and traffic to your website.

James Harrison at JameSEO just wrote an article outlining 20+ video promotion tips for YouTube. It’s a solid checklist to follow and will give your videos on YouTube a strong SEO promotion boost and it is a great advanced addition to our earlier article on YouTube SEO.

For context: I’m firmly in the less advertising is better camp. I think that we’re bombarded past all reason at this point with advertising and honestly I think the overuse is making all consumers more and more resistant to advertising. Yes it still works or business wouldn’t do it, but how many consumers are with me on the idea of seeing less advertising?

Putting on the business hat though: Show me that it’s killer effective to run forced ads and I have to be there, using it for my business and for my customers. We gotta eat, right?

YouTube has been doing some limited testing of pre-roll advertising; pre-roll ads run before the content that you want to watch. People don’t like them much and I have to wonder what the long term effect would be if they rolled them out, en masse tomorrow?

I’ve given up on “regular TV.” We unhooked the cable and only use our AppleTV and DVD’s for entertainment. What that’s done is educated me that commercial free entertainment is much more enjoyable. After a year, I cannot watch regular TV and enjoy it. I want to be entertained, not have to watch commercials for stuff I’m mainly not interested in…

Makes for a conundrum – I have to market to grow my and my customer’s business; advertising is a big part of that. How do we make advertising less intrusive and more targeted to when people are looking for a product or service?

This is one of the big reasons I love SEO, Video and PPC advertising. They reach people when they are wanting more information -now- about that product or service – no intrusion!