We’ve all watched videos of hot rod cars and cats wrestling on YouTube. Face it: watching online videos is one of the most fun ways to waste time there is. But you can also use YouTube to help increase your business’s success. Used well, YouTube can be a great way to draw positive attention to your business. Here are the basic steps of using YouTube as part of your marketing plan.

1. Figure out exactly what it is you want the site to do for your business: promote the sale of a particular product or service? give useful information with maybe a small ad pitch at the end? Entertain potential customers? There are all kinds of ways that online video can benefit your bottom line. Choose one or two and define them so that you can evaluate the success of the video or videos later on.

2. Learn your way around YouTube and familiarize yourself with various types of videos. Look at other promotional videos and see which ones get a lot of views. Do those videos have anything in common? If so, and if it’s something you could incorporate into your promotional video, then take notes. You might also look through the comments of videos you like. Sometimes the information in the comments is just as useful as in the video itself.

3. Create your profile. This is a very important step, so do not underestimate it. Give people some information with real substance to it. If it looks like your video has been abandoned on a lonely YouTube outpost, nobody will want to watch it. So get on there, create a good, professional profile, and spend some time watching videos related to your line of work and commenting on them.

4. Now it’s time to make a video and upload it. It doesn’t have to be formulaic, unless that helps you to plan out your video. Use your imagination - those three to five minutes are your chance to get something across to people in an entertaining and useful manner. It’s fine to use humor, but don’t make your video too silly or nobody will take your product or service seriously. Clean up your video with simple video editing software and get it to where it tells a story. Even if it’s a very short story it will resonate better than a hodge-podge of random observations on your business.

5. Get out the vote. Submit your video to the most appropriate category and channel. Do you have online friends from a social networking site? Do you have a Twitter account? Put a link there, and solicit your online friends to watch your video and rate it. While you probably won’t be lucky enough that your video will “go viral,” you can get a decent snowball effect where your contacts notify their contacts, and little by little you get a lot of views.

6. It’s not that likely that someone will simply stumble upon your video on YouTube and then go to stumbleupon.com and bookmark it, though it is theoretically possible. So you need to promote your video yourself. Besides Facebook and Twitter, there’s MySpace, Digg, and Technorati. If you have a just-for-fun social blog, embed your video or put in a link. You never know who might see your video and tell others about it.

Think about just a few years ago when YouTube was a novelty. Now think about the millions of people who watch stuff on it every single day. There’s probably no way you could buy commercial television airtime with the potential to reach as many viewers as a well-executed, well-promoted YouTube video, and the costs are next to nothing. There’s no reason not to take advantage of this new medium.