Throughout this series on running a successful online video contest, we've covered a lot of ground. We talked about the importance of The Premise and The Prize. We've also looked at using earned, owned, and paid media to promote your contest on a budget.

Greetings, and Happy Day After Thanksgiving--AKA Black Friday. While many of you might be out standing in line for new video gadgets on sale or being trampled at Wal-Mart by the masses, some of you are back to work, fighting the turkey hangover. You didn't think I would make you endure a Friday without a long list of the week's best viral videos, did you

Last week, in the first part of the ‘promote’ chapter of this series on how to run a successful online video contest, we talked about some of the ways you can utilize Paid Media to attract attention to your contest while still remaining on a budget. Today in the next section of the promote chapter, we look at ways of using owned media channels to increase awareness about your online video contest and drive users to your contest site.

Do you suppose we’ll see many Black Friday ads, Small Business Saturday stories, and Cyber Monday deals this week?

NBC-owned iVillage has steadily grown the frequency and amount of video across its site and is now generating more than 4 million video views each month, with plans to expand the video on its site in 2012.

Content creation has been a central part of most SEO strategies for years. In the beginning, we based that content around keywords and phrases we wanted to rank for. When links gained much more importance with the engines, we began to create "viral' content designed to elicit links

As users upload videos and share them with their friends, your video contest will form a viral loop and begin to naturally promote itself. Until then however, it’s worthwhile investing some time & effort in promoting your contest and in the first section of the ‘Promoting on a Budget’ chapter of this series, we will look at several ways you can use paid media to create awareness and drive traffic to your contest site. This post was made possible by Launchpad6 , an out of the box solution for creating video contests.

This week we look at the recent news of the online video world and highlight a lot of statistics that have come up regarding online video usage, views, and consumptions.

Contrary to popular belief, the best prizes aren’t always the one’s with the largest monetary value. There are other factors that impact whether a prize will be attractive to your audience.

I had the pleasure of conducting a video interview with