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Video Killed the Blogging Star: Getting Started with Video Marketing

It’s no secret that videos are an essential part of any online marketing campaign. Online videos are relatively inexpensive to produce and even easier to propagate through sites like YouTube, Vimeo and Veoh. Videos can also promote heavy traffic as well as organic search results – Google loves videos and more often than not, videos are some of the first results that pop up on top. Besides, multimedia presentations are much more engaging than plain text and pictures. In fact, in a study by research group BIA Kelsey, it was concluded that 55% of participants visited a website after viewing a video, and more importantly, 24% of them actually bought something from the website.

So anyone with a camera and an Internet connection can make a video – but that doesn’t mean you should just shoot a video without rhyme or reason. A bad video can backfire – many badly written and produced videos achieve Internet infamy and end up as laughing stocks. If you’re thinking of creating your own online video to promote your business, the following are some tips to get you started:

Content is the key

People will need a reason to watch your video, which is why that’ll be the most important decision you’ll make. When you promote your product, service or business, make sure you put your best foot forward. Create a message that is relevant to your audience, which will make them want to view the entire video. How you present it really depends on your target market, but if you have good material from the beginning you can package it any way you want. Don’t forget to put a call to action at the end – what do you want them to do? Click on a link? Call your office? Buy your product? This will make your video’s results measurable.

Scale, but don’t skimp

Once you’ve got your content, you’ll have to actually make the video. Just because you can get the lowest price by asking your neighbor’s teenage son to shoot and edit the video in his basement, doesn’t mean you should. Sure, The Star Wars Kid was cute and had thousands of hits, but you don’t really want your business to be equated to something cheap and amateurish. At the same time, spending millions on an online video is probably not a good idea either (unless you have the money to burn.) Take a look at your budget and your predicted ROI and try to find a happy medium between third rate and extravagant.

Optimize your video and make it SEO friendly

Having your video in HD is great, but unless you’re planning on renting out the nearest IMAX theater, there’s probably no need to keep it in a high-resolution format. Most likely you’ll need to reduce the file size and reformat the video several times, depending on where you want to post it. On a side note, since you know that this is an online video, your videographer should shoot it depending on your specifications. While some sites are capable of HD you will want to have other formats handy.

Before you post that video anywhere, make sure it will work for you by maximizing its Search Engine Optimization (SEO) friendly. Adding meta tags, descriptions and using keywords relevant to the video will ensure that your video can be found easily through search engines like Google and Yahoo.

Promote it everywhere

Once you’re satisfied with your video. Cover all your social media outlets – not just popular video sharing sites like Youtube, Vimeo, Veoh, Blip.tv, MetaCafe etc., but promote it on your Facebook FanPage, Twitter Account and website. Send it out as part of your email newsletter or tell people about it on forums (but don’t spam!). You can also post it on popular social bookmarking sites like Delicious, Digg.com, StumbleVideo, etc. for maximum effect and to drive traffic to your video.

A one-stop-shop for video promotion for those short on time is TubeMogul. This will syndicate your video and post it on up to 25 different sites at once. Once the video is uploaded itʼs important to optimize the videos with relevant key words so that the video will be search engine optimized and show up when people are searching for that relevant key word term online.

When done right, online videos can give you some of the best publicity for your business. Interested in starring in your own production? We’d love to sit down and discuss all the possibilities, so drop us a line today.

And, if you have a free second check out one of our online videos that highlights some recent web site design work we’ve done!

Tags: Blogging, Online Marketing, Self Promotion, Video Blog, Video Marketing

This entry was posted on Monday, March 22nd, 2010 at 8:57 am and is filed under Accessibility, Blogging, Marketing Ideas, Online Marketing, Social Media, Video, Web Performance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.