When article directories became the rage a few years ago, now with hundreds, even thousands of them all over the web, syndication became a serious business.

Once we had several hundred sites to submit to we were more then eager to find solutions for syndication that didn't require us to submit articles by hand to each article directory.

And the solutions came screaming at us. Now it is unheard of to submit your articles by hand to all the important directories. Services abound to help you with article syndication today.

Enter Web 2.0. Video is all the rage, YouTube.com sells for a billion and change, and video search engines are popping up everywhere.

Everyone wants to be next. And they are throwing free video sharing and streaming at their visitors to attract a following.

Video is coming into its own now and people are marketing their sites by providing content in video, but not nearly as much as content is still provided via the written word.

Here is where it gets exciting. The cost of entry into the video production and syndication world, financially and learning curve-wise, is always going to be a bit higher than article creation and syndication.

Everyone and their sister can sit down and bang out an article like this one. Everyone has access to and knows how to use word processing programs.

Video is a whole different beast. You have to know how to shoot it, how to do screen captures (for how-to videos), how to produce a video that looks and sounds good, and how to get that video into the growing list of places that organize that medium exclusively.

Frankly, people will always be scared of the jump between article marketing and video marketing. This leaves a much smaller number of people competing in video search engines for eyeballs than there are now in article directories.

I see a massive upsurge coming in 2007 in the number of people creating and sharing how-to videos and viral videos to promote their sites, but nothing like the article marketing explosion in the last few years.

It's that barrier of technology and a higher learning curve that will keep the weekend promoters at bay for a good while, until video production and marketing is as common as article marketing. (If that day ever comes.)

My tip for 2007

Get into video. Learn about how to produce it and syndicate it. Find out what's going on at YouTube.com and how people are generating massive video subscriber lists and traffic back to their main sites with video.

It will take some surfing, some thinking, and some creativity, and that is exactly why you want to know everything you can about video marketing.

Because most people simply will not take the time to learn about video marketing until those of us who are doing it now are so entrenched, it won't matter!