One natural way to promote your video online is make use of that mother of all web video - YouTube. Millions of visitors trawl YouTube each day and you'll do well to tap on that traffic.
 

Promote your video online via YouTube
 

One important thing is to give your video an attractive sounding title so that it catches the attention of visitors. Also, you'll need to format your video properly - and ensure it is plays smoothly. I personally don't like YouTube videos which are slow to load - they are a pain to watch.

Some other people I know host their videos on their own domain. So what you do is to sign up with a web hosting company like Yahoo! and then upload your video into the site. From there, you have to format your page and embed the video, then sort out the HTML to ensure your video is displaying properly. You can then direct traffic and visitors to that page to ensure the video gets exposure on the Web.

Believe it or not, there are professionals out there who can help you promote your video online. Some of them are search engine optimization (SEO) professionals who can tweak the meta-tags on pages containing your videos, so that search engines can find your video more easily. These folks are good but only if you get a really good one. I've encountered some shoddy SEO who just want to make a quick buck. Avoid those fellas!

Whatever is on the Web can always be promoted off the Web. What I'm trying to say is, you can promote your web video by printing flyers, T-shirts, brochures or what have you and distributing it in your local mall or neighborhood. This method is actually quite effective.

I've seen many folks do it and get very good response rates in terms of traffic to their online videos.

A very effective way to promote that video of yours is to get a testimonial from a well-known blogger or company. Imagine if your video get quoted by Wired.com as an interesting video - I can just imagine the avalanche of traffic that will descend on your site after that! Finding these folks to give you testimony may be challenging though - you need to be persistent and keep emailing the big guns and see if they can help you out. I tend to get good response from famous bloggers who blog about the topic of my web video.

Well! I hope the above tips have helped you understand what you need to do to promote your video online. We're in a whole new online video world and do give your videos exposure, you need to employ a new bag of tricks. Apply these tips the next time you create a video and see if they work for you.