Video marketing is one of the latest forms of online marketing to emerge as a major avenue for building traffic. It offers webmasters the opportunity to brand their website and to conduct viral marketing campaigns that have the potential to drive masses of traffic to a website. Web viewers want to gain access to relevant information quickly and painlessly, and video marketing offers exactly that.

Supply Is Greater Than Demand
While streaming video content is already very popular with the web surfing public, it has yet to really catch on with the majority of Internet marketers. This offers even further advantages to the Webmaster willing to take the plunge. There are many ways to use good video content, not least to improve conversions and increase sales.

Increasing Site Conversions
In order to ensure that you are getting the greatest possible ROI from your online efforts you need to have the greatest possible conversion rate on your pages. Web users have a notoriously short attention span. Because video is easy to view and requires very little effort on the part of the surfer, short video clips have become an extremely popular form of web content.
Including video tutorials, video introductions, and video demos on the pages of your own site can improve conversions. Many surfers are intrigued by the existence of video and, especially if you advertise the fact that it is a short clip, are likely to click and view it. With a well designed and appealing clip this can greatly improve the conversions from your website.

A Viral Marketing Technique
Every website should have a wide selection of advertising and marketing methods. Viral marketing can give a site a real injection of traffic. Create a compelling advertisement and distribute it through video sharing websites, as well as industry channels, and you could witness a traffic explosion to your website.
Viral marketing requires extremely compelling content. Your video clip needs to spark some kind of emotive reaction, whether it be humor and intrigue or even dislike and controversy. Controversial advertisements will almost always create some kind of buzz, but you have to be careful that it doesn’t backfire and alienate your potential visitors.

Website Branding
Website branding helps position your website in the minds of visitors. Good branding means that visitors will continue to return to your website and you will be at the forefront of their mind when they require a service you provide. Branding may not give you the immediate return that other marketing strategies such as Pay Per Click provide, but over time it will not only increase site visitors it will promote customer loyalty and improve your ROI.

Video marketing offers a method to brand your site. Including your site logo on any streaming video is a positive move. Video is very linkable at the moment, because even though surfers love to view video, there are comparatively few sites taking advantage. If you are submitting video content to video sharing websites or other channels then using branded video clips will increase your website’s exposure to the market.

Video Marketing For Your Success
Video marketing is a powerful new tool in the web marketer’s arsenal. It gives surfers the quick hit that they demand in a fast paced environment, and can be easily branded and optimized for success. There are a number of ways in which a powerfully created video clip can be used, both on your own website and for submission to video channels and other advertising avenues. If you aren’t using video yet, then you should start before it becomes a much more popular method of delivering a marketing message.

Video communication is an excellent way for internet marketers to reach their prospective customers and present their products or services. The use of videos on the Internet marketing scene brings a lot of advantages and provides a great solution because of its impact on the visitor and its ability to combine the advantages of “classic” TV advertising with the interactivity offered by the Internet.

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There are a few video marketing concepts that you should keep in mind when creating your video marketing campaign and these are:

The videos that you create should fit with your brand and should be able to connect with your target market. A lot of marketers had to deal with huge losses because their message didn’t appeal to their target market.
You should know your target market properly and your videos should be made in a way so as to appeal to your target market and capture their attention.

It is a known fact now that Google is favoring videos and is giving high rankings to videos. A very good approach would be to use meta tags for the content (text) of the page where your video is placed. Using keywords in the video titles and their descriptions could even help you to gain search engine rankings for your videos. Even Video search engines will find it much easier to index your video files and link it to your web pages. Use anchor text for you videos if you are linking to it from other pages of your Web site.

A video ad can contain a demonstration of a product’s use and usability. Using a human face and a very pleasant voice is a very good strategy and you can have your prospects dying to buy your products. By using these techniques, the prospective customer can relate more to your company and to what you’re promoting.

One of the greatest benefits of video marketing is that videos can be played on demand and you should make sure to let people download your videos so that they are able to view it even when they are not connected to the internet.

No Comments » Posted by mikel / video tips

Putting together just any old video and posting it on the web and putting together an effective video and posting it on the web is two completely different things. These tips that will help your videos get the attention that they deserve, leading to more exposure and overall sales.

Use Creative Titles- This is very important because the title of your video is often the first thing a person sees before watching it. Think of something that will make people curious in your video, think a little “outside the box.” You really want something that is going to grab their attention as soon as they see it.

High Quality- Be as professional as you can afford. You don’t need a million dollar budget or shoot it from a movie set. Just make sure that your video is clear visually and the audio is sharp. Also make sure you shoot your video in a well lit area and there are no objects behind you that are going to make the viewer lose focus on you. If possible, try to be the only subject in the screen.

Have A Point – Get your point across. By the end of your video a viewer should know exactly what it was your video was trying to tell them. Try not to make your video vague, confusing or misleading.

Get To The Point - Remember that people have a very short attention span, especially those on the Internet. Your video needs to be able to get to the point in a short period of time. Try to keep your video less than 3 minutes. Anything past that, you are risking losing the attention of the viewer. Avoid rambling to make your video longer. It is OK if your video is only a minute long just as long as you got your point across.

Link To Your Website- Be sure to put your website address in the video, and in the description part of the video (if applicable). Mention the name of your website once or twice throughout you video. The goal is to get the viewer to your site.

Using these tips will make your video marketing a lot easier, get the attention that it deserves leading to more exposure and overall sales, and you will in turn get better results. If you apply these 5 simple but effective tips to your video marketing; your sales will at least double, maybe even triple within the first month of applying them.

No Comments » Posted by mikel / video tips

Video sites are becoming huge and very popular all across the world. Probably the most popular of them all is YouTube.com. More people use YouTube for search than all other search engines except Google, and Google owns Youtube.

Now you can cash in on these sites’ popularity and start generating your own income by creatingweb videos that sell. When it comes to making videos for the web that sell there is a right way to do it and a wrong way. Most people unknowingly do it the wrong way.

Let’s take a look at the basic setup you will first need in order to crate a web video.

• Computer
• Webcam or camcorder, either one will work, or images, or presentation slides
• Access to the Internet
• Basic video editing software
• YouTube.com account

Once you have those five things setup you are ready to get started. Now the fun really begins. You first want to record your video. This can take some time if you do not plan it out. I suggest writing what you want to say on paper first then go from there.

The next step after you record your video is to save it to your computer. I recommend you save it as either a MOV file or an AVI file as these have good quality. Once you have it on your computer the next step is to open it up in some type of basic video editing software program.

After you open it up in the video editing program you will want to add text over top of your video so you can right messages, or type the link to your website. This will allow people to see either your message or link to your website while they watch your video.

Now comes the easiest part, and that is to upload your video to your brand new You Tube account you created. One thing I recommend you do after you upload it to You Tube is in your video description put your link to your website. This will turn it into a link people can click on while watching your video. This is a great way to get traffic to your site.

With that said video sites are growing, and they are a great way to get free web traffic to your website in a few hours or days. It is easy to do once you get the hang of it, and it is completely free. The only expense involved is buying the webcam if you do not already have one.

Quick tip: the best videos are ones that are short, and funny. If you do not like being in front of the camera you can easily just make a video with music and images as they work well also.

No Comments » Posted by mikel / video tips

Let’s summarize the steps involved in a campaign to promote a product or service named "Clean Red Widgets".

The goal is getting to the top of Google search results for the phrase Clean Red Widgets. Traditional methods would include creating a blog, doing on-page optimizing and promoting off-page, using link building with keywords, tags, and bookmarking.

Now that YouTube is now second only to Google as the most popular search site, more people search for something via the YouTube site than via Yahoo and MSN. But how does that affect marketing tactics?

Obviously putting your message in front of the most people is desirable. With so many people searching on YouTube, which has only video results, it is obvious that you need a video presence there to be found.

But does the traffic convert or can your product or service be sold to video viewers? How do you optimize video for search? How do you promote video off-page? Does video help Google ranking?

These are the questions and challenges for a video campaign. A video campaign can be a series of blog posts with video content and less emphasis on text content.

The first task is to come up with some content suitable for video. Quality standards on YouTube are typically fairly low both in terms of subject matter and also image resolution. Recently YouTube has upped the player quality to allow high definition playback if the source video permits. As standards and expectations rise you should aim for high quality video i.e. High Definition and widescreen format.

A quick and easy way would be to just turn on your web cam and speak for a few minutes, and then load it up to YouTube. This is the simplest way to create content and done by many marketers. To be successful it requires a certain level of confidence, knowledge, and personality. It also takes some practice to be able to pull it off. That being said, some goofy, candid, impromptu videos have been very successful with certain audiences.

If you are not ready to put yourself on video you can use a slide show format and music background. This is not the quickest nor easiest method, and it lacks some motion impact, but it is a good way to start without appearing amateurish.

Planning

Begin by writing out a list of questions about ‘clean red widgets’ and create 5 topics containing 5 – 10 statements.

These topics can be classic sales or marketing categories such as

1. pain points,
2. benefits,
3. features,
4. function,
5. potential.

Think in terms of recognizing people’s problems, offering solutions, and describing how your product achieves it.

Use this short list of

• Why?: why you (the reader)
  
  why me (the author)

  why this (the offer)

  why now (the urgency)

  why this price (the value)

  (the answers are because …)

• What?
• How?
• What if?

When you create answers to these questions you will have the material you need to make a great presentation that draws your audience in and not come across as a scammer salesperson.

Using MS Powerpoint, Apple Keynote, OpenOffice Impress, or Google Presentation, create slides and save each as a jpg file, or better, a tif image for higher resolution. All of these programs have templates and backgrounds to choose from and steps to add images and text to create professional looking slides.

Try not to cram too much text into slides so that it takes longer than 5 seconds to read, nor make the font so small as to be difficult to see. They may look large on your computer swcreen but will be a lot smaller in a video player. Make images and clipart large, say 4” and font sizes large, say 18 – 36 points. Avoid bulleted lists.

Then use a video editor program such as MS MovieMaker, Apple iMovie, or ZS4 to import the image files into a slide show sequence. MovieMaker is very easy to learn and contains enough features, such as fade transitions, titles, credits, overlays and audio track additions, to create a professional looking video production. A commentary narrative could be created separately and added, or you can choose royalty free music.

Editing audio, and matching audio length to video, is a much greater challenge than editing video tracks. It is easier to lay down the audio and clip the video to length.

For most marketing purposes keep the video length short; 30 seconds to 5 minutes, in order not to lose your viewer’s interest. Most TV commercials are 30 or 60 seconds. For instructional or demonstration videos you may need to break the necessary content into several segments.

No Comments » Posted by mikel / video tips

Import your raw video source file, or your presentation slides files, music or voiceover file into your editing program. For slides, set the elapsed time on each to allow easy reading. This would typically be about 4 seconds. Some simple images may be shorter time periods.

Use the editor’s effects features sparingly to add transitions such as fades between slides and fade in at the beginning and fade out at the end.

Similarly fade the audio in and out, beginning and end.

Add title text at the beginning and credits at the end. You may also want to overlay a caption such as your web site address. An overlay or watermark is useful to maintain authorship credit if your video is copied from the hosting site.

There is no need to try fancy transitions and special effects. Keep it simple and smooth. Do not obsess over fine details but try to achieve a straightforward professional look.

Each video editing program has its own way of operating but save your project frequently and use new names before you do a major change in order to allow you to revert to an earlier version if necessary.

When starting out keep your production short. You will find that you replay your edited piece multiple times and it is quicker to review short takes.

No Comments » Posted by mikel / video tips

The biggest issue with MS MovieMaker is choosing the output options for file format and resolution quality. Microsoft likes its proprietary wmv format for Media Player, and most video hosting sites accept it, but the compression locally and conversion at the host site can result in poor quality.

Opinion is that wmv files are good for high motion video content and makes for smaller sized files. But the MovieMaker program does not offer rendering to mpeg4 or flash format, the preferred format that can be played on all computers and at a high quality. By submitting wmv files to hosting sites another conversion is performed. This extra conversion is out of your control and may use undesirable default quality parameters.

By uploading your video already in mp4 format, you virtually eliminate another conversion cycle, and can better decide on the quality of the result.

A hosted or streamed video is only as good as its original source and wmv files converted to mp4 may not look great. For MS Moviemaker, one choice from within your editor is to publish or render your project to NTSC and save as an avi file, then use a conversion utility to encode to mp4. One such utility is SUPER, Simplified Universal Player Encoder & Renderer, by erightsoft.com

There are also some online conversion sites that can do this for you.

However, avi files are enormous and re-encoding can take a long time, and even then the results are not always as good as you might expect. A better choice is to use an editor that can output your file directly to mp4.

Camtasia from Techsmith is another choice for editing videos on a PC. Camtasia Studio offers similar operation to MovieMaker plus more features, and it can render to mov files used by Apple Quicktime, and also to flash files for self-hosting. There are options to choose H264 and MPEG4 compression. Camtasia is best known for its screen capture ability, which is another great way to create video content.

Another choice for the PC is Sony Vegas Pro. The user interface for this program is less intuitive but the program has many editing possibilities and control of the output file quality.

After researching many video creators’ advice, and testing various rendering combinations, my conclusion is to end up producing an mp4 file. Mp4 can be played by PCs and Macs without proprietary players and hosting sites seem to accept mp4 uploads as is without conversion to a lower quality.

For high quality, a good standard is to use H264 compression and encode at a bitrate of at least 2,000kbps. Widescreen aspect ratio of 16:9 comes from the original video source or can be ‘letterboxed’ as a last resort if using 4:3 raw video.

The best input and output size is 1280 x 720 pixels, otherwise called 720p HD. An mp4 file with these values will be a manageable file size, accepted by practically all hosting sites and will display with excellent fidelity, on most people’s screen size.

No Comments » Posted by mikel / video tips

YouTube has upped the level at which videos can be played online. High quality and high definition are possible and allows higher resolution than previous years of blurred YouTube videos.

A consequence of this is the importance of starting with a good quality camera. Now a HD camera is a must-use, be able to record at a minimum 1280 x 720 or higher, and at 30 frames per second or better. Also be aware that good camera work, or lack of, becomes more obvious. A tripod and minimal zoom and pan are recommended. If your original video source is poor there is no amount of editing or conversion that can improve it.

So now you should have used your good raw video footage or slides, edited it and added your graphics, transitions, and audio tracks. And as covered previously, you have rendered the output to a MP4 file with H264 compression at a minimum 2 Megabits per second bitrate, and 1280 by 720 pixels for a wide screen 16 to 9 aspect ratio, and at a frame rate of 30 frames per second.

Now you are ready to publish your video to YouTube. There is a limit of 1GB in file size and to 10 minutes run time. The file size is determined by the video run time in seconds times the bit rate divided by 8 (bits per byte). e.g. 3 minutes at 2Mbps = 45MB

If you don’t already have an account at YouTube, register for free at http://www.youtube.com/signup?next=/index

Once signed in to your account, click on the Upload button at the top right. Browse to your local file and select Upload Video. Fill out the fields for Title, Description, Tags, and select a Category and sharing option.

The fields should be composed with SEO features in mind. Title will be how the video is listed in YouTube and the Tags are your targeted keywords that people will search for. In the Description field begin with your website URL first. It becomes a hyperlink to your site and has high visibility in the info excerpt when the video is listed.

Once the file is uploaded it is encoded and takes a few minutes to become available for viewing. You can go back any time to your account videos and edit the information fields about them and also add more details such as a geographic location.

You can also choose a different thumbnail. By default YouTube uses a still image at the mid point of the video. You may choose to pick a different thumbnail that is at the beginning or end. Changes can takes hours to occur.

If your uploaded video is of sufficient quality as laid out in the specifications here then it can display as wide screen High Definition, but this is not by default. Playing the video on YouTube’s site will display at ‘normal quality’.

Now, there is a trick to having YouTube play back in High Quality. For awhile there has been ‘high quality’ available from YouTube either as a switch on the bottom right of the player, or by forcing the playback to high quality by adding &fmt=18 to the end of the video’s URL.

To force high quality playback when embedding a YouTube video into a blog post you can add &ap=%2526fmt%3D18 to end of the video ID.

More recently YouTube rolled out High Definition wide screen if the uploaded source could do it. You may have started noticing a few videos like that lately. Source video permitting, to force the player to HD wide screen, add &fmt=22 to the end of the URL. To force High Definition playback when embedding a YouTube video into a blog post you can add &ap=%2526fmt%3D22 to end of the video ID.

No Comments » Posted by mikel / video tips

Play Standard mode: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsoz9LxHSiA

Play High Quality mode: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsoz9LxHSiA&fmt=18

Play High Definition mode: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsoz9LxHSiA&fmt=22

To embed YouTube video in your web page:

HTML Standard mode:

<object width="480" height="295"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/fsoz9LxHSiA&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/fsoz9LxHSiA&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="295"></embed></object>

HTML High Definition mode:

<object width="480" height="295"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/fsoz9LxHSiA&ap=%2526fmt%3D22 &hl=en&fs=1&rel=0"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/fsoz9LxHSiA&ap=%2526fmt%3D22 &hl=en&fs=1&rel=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="295"></embed></object>

Note: the code in bold is added after the video ID number to force High Definition playback.

You may also select the image size from the available 4 choices, or edit the width= and height= code to the dimensions you prefer. Keep the aspect ratio, or proportions, to 16:9.

No Comments » Posted by mikel / video tips