Online videos have been a growing trend, with everything from news to music to how-to videos being used by local businesses to build and promote their brand and customer base. And with stats from different surveys showing that not only the trend in producing videos is growing, but that the trend in the online viewer community is growing as well, creating videos to promote a local business is a smart move.

According to a recent quarterly marketing data report by HubSpot, a new white paper from comScore showed that an average of 179 million Americans watched video each month in 2010. In addition, eMarketer.com reported that two-thirds of the Executives who viewed work videos visited vendor sites, with 50% of them looking into additional information. With these kinds of stats, we’d be crazy not to use video to promote our local business, not to mention, videos can be a great way to boost local business search engine rankings and SEO.

Below are three tips that work for our clients to effectively promote their local businesses via online videos:

Keep them short and simple. With our short attention spans, we like to get information and then run with it as consumers, so keep your videos as brief and to-the-point as possible; five minutes or less is perfect. If you have quite a bit of content to share, consider breaking it down into parts and making a video series.

Post and repost. Post your online videos on YouTube, and then repost those links to your company website in addition to all of your social media sites and campaigns, such as FaceBook, Twitter, email, and your blog. This can help with local search engine rankings and traffic in addition to building your brand. Also, when posting on YouTube, don’t forget to include GEO modifiers to help boost your local search engines rankings.

Repurpose content. There are several different types of videos you can create for posting, including testimonials, how-to, tips, interviews, and so on. At the same time, if you’re ever struggling for content, you likely have tons of material you can repurpose and make into a video, such as information from blogs, articles, pamphlets, interviews, training sessions, webinars, presentations or newsletters. Get creative and have fun with it. Online video is a trend that will likely be around for a while, and luckily, it doesn’t have to be difficult to create them. Use these tips to make online videos work for you easily and cost effectively starting yesterday!

Chris Marentis writes from experience about lead generation, closing the sale and leveraging social media. He is the founder and CEO for a local internet marketing company Surefire Social, a resource for local search marketing