How do I upload a video to YouTube?

Hmm... what are the odds? YouTube has millions of videos uploaded on a daily basis, so unless your dog is staggeringly cute or wacky, I have to say that odds aren't great you'll be hitting the big time. Then again, who am I to prognosticate? Look at the top dozen videos on YouTube and half of them see to be random goofiness or something wacky or cute kids (or animals) doing something silly or embarrassing.

Seriously, YouTube is the perfect place to upload a funny video. Just make sure it's less than fifteen minutes long and not, um, inappropriate or overly crude.

Generally speaking, YouTube is quite easy to work with so you shouldn't have any sort of problems uploading your video. Here are the steps required...

Of course, the first step is to go to YouTube and sign in. Once you go there, look on the top right to see if you're logged in:

You can see I'm not logged in because, well, it says "Log In". Once you are logged in, it shows your YouTube account name instead:

If you don't have an account, sign up for one. It's easy and free.

Once you've logged in, click on the "Upload" link on the top right to move to the spot where you can actually specify the file you want to upload to YouTube:

Have a ".MOV" movie file on your computer? No worries, just drag and drop the file onto the Web browser in the specified place:

It immediately begins the upload process, which can take rather a while...

Eventually it finishes up then starts to build thumbnails:

Don't just sit and stare at that, however. Scroll down and start filling out the individual fields, and pay attention to them: good keywords and a good description are the main ways you're going to have people find your video when they do searches:

You can see here that for the demo video I uploaded, I used as many relevant keywords as possible, then wrote a description that hopefully would pique people's interest.

Once I click on "Save" to save the additional information, YouTube wraps up the configuration and shares a live URL you can disseminate to friends and family:

Finally, you can click thru - to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUmHlgHVzG0 -- and see it live on YouTube. It looks like this:

Stay tuned, I'll be posting more articles on how to embed a YouTube video ont a Web page (like this one) and how to share a YouTube video with Facebook friends at the click of a mouse.

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