How to get your marketing Videos seen
As you read this article, over 100 million videos are being viewed online. Over 100 million surfers watch online videos every day. The traffic generated by video marketing is huge and it’s not something your marketing can do without.
Websites without video are slowly becoming a dying breed. No one can dispute the fact that marketing videos produce traffic and more sales. Video has become the rule rather than the exception and our online success depends to a large extent on the marketing videos we produce and add to our sites.
The new internet, or Web 2.0 as it’s become known, is driven by multimedia. It’s this new multimedia environment that we find ourselves in as internet marketers.
Typically a new marketing campaign would fellow the well trodden PPC path. The cost of clicks in PPC however has risen to the point were campaigns with even double digit CTR’s are no longer profitable, even without taking into account how effective video marketing is at generating traffic.
Don’t get me wrong here. I still use PPC and will continue to drive traffic to my sites using PPC for the foreseeable future. The net is changing though and if we don’t want to go the way of T-Rex, we need to evolve our marketing strategies.
Making a marketing video isn’t an overly complex undertaking. The software applications required are mostly simple and reasonably priced, so much so, that a full suite of programs needn’t cost more than a few hundred dollars.
How we choose to market our videos though can be the cause of complications and errors. The simplest way to market a video is to submit it to the various video sites, for example Yahoo Video or Google Video or YouTube.
After we submit our videos to the hosting sites, we can then use the code the sites provide, to embed these videos in our own sites, without requiring any additional conversion. This is a simple process, but not one I would suggest the serious internet marketer uses.
The reason is quite simple. Taking the embed codes from the hosting sites, such as Google Video for example, also carries across embedded videos from other users.
Video hosting sites group the videos submitted to them into categories. Taking an embed code from a video site could well result in additional videos being carried across from a competitor site for example. We would then be offering free traffic and advertising to this competitor, which is not really something we should be doing.
The safest and most efficient way to add our own videos to our own marketing websites, is to convert these to a flash format and add the resulting flash video to our site. To do this we need a reliable video converter.
Typically, videos tend to have large files sizes, so much so, that most of the video sites now limit the videos they accept to around 100 MB size and 10 minute length. This 100 MB size, gives a good indication of the amount of information we need to convert.
This video conversion takes time and for most of us, this our computer is fully occupied for this time, meaning we can’t do any of the other tasks our online marketing requires.
As internet marketers we should learn the value of our time and how to use this resource more effectively. Video is an equally effective resource and if we can combine efficient use of both these resources, our marketing efforts will succeed.
I’ve seen too many of my fellow marketers invest big money in the latest and most complex video production software and then skimp when it came to the converter. The result ? Great looking videos that nobody ever saw simply because their conversion software wasn’t up to the task.
From bargain basement to top range converters, prices range from around $70 to under $100. Is the $30 difference worth lost time and effort? I don’t think so.
