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Hey, it's Simon with Commune Media.
If you're on our mailing list, you know that we focus on web writing and online content for internet marketing. In this video, I'm going to help you start successfully marketing with video content.
Now, we're not going to talk about creating flashy videos for your homepage. Rather, we're going to talk about creating valuable video content that both drives traffic to your website, and provides useful information on your website to build relationships, convey your expertise and ultimately sell more of your products and services.
But before we get into some steps to success, let's address some nagging questions you may have.
"Do you really need to get started with video marketing?"
"Is it worth it?"
The answer is undoubtedly, "Yes."
First, if you don't, you're missing a huge percentage of your market.
Reports suggest that half the population of the US alone will watch online videos this year, a total of more than 150 million people.
Furthermore, YouTube is the third most trafficked website behind Yahoo! and Google.
Second, video is a way to reach people who might not respond to text.
Some of these people may be low-literacy users, who make up about 30% of the online population.
Others may simply absorb information better through video, due to their learning strategies and sensory modalities.
So, now that you know why you need to get started with video, let's look at how.
Plan. Produce. Publish. Profit.
At Commune, we use a four-step process for our own--and our clients'--content-based marketing efforts.
The four steps are: Plan, Produce, Publish, Profit.
In highly summarized form, here's how they apply to your video marketing efforts.
Plan
First, the plan.
With your plan, you need to at the very least define your objectives, subject matter and target keywords.
Your objective is your goal; what are you trying to accomplish with your video marketing?
Your goal should be to provide value and help people solve problems.
Here you might object that many viral videos on YouTube provide little value, but merely entertain.
Well, entertaining is value, but it typically doesn't solve problems.
And unless you're trying to build a brand by associating it with an entertaining video, you should adopt a different strategy.
The internet is a problem-solving machine, people turn to it when they want to solve their problems, and buy products and services from those that help them do it.
Remember, most people start their internet activities with a search for something that answers an immediate need or question.
You might get fewer viewers with a solution-oriented video, but those viewers will be more qualified to be customers.
As to the subject, it should obviously relate to your business.
I'll leave the subject matter to you, because you know your business best; just be sure that it addresses your customers' needs and doesn't just satisfy your ego.
Far too many websites and videos self-promote themselves out of business; prospects don't care about you, they care about what you can do for them.
Now to keywords.
Once you define your subject matter, you need to distill keywords that not only relate to your video but, more importantly, to your business.
These keywords should ideally have high search volume and low competition.
You can use these keywords to describe your video and link back to your website, which we'll get to in a minute.
Produce
Now let's look at production.
A tutorial on video production is obviously beyond the scope of this video.
But there are a few tips I'd like to share.
One is on the importance of creating an outline before you start shooting.
Some people just start filming whatever comes to mind, and that can be okay, but there are advantages to thinking things through.
One of these is that you can convert your outline to a printed "transcript" that you can run alongside your video on blog posts and in descriptions about your video.
This transcript is more search engine friendly than your video itself, and you can use it as well as embedded links to better optimize your site for search engines.
To see an example, visit Communemedia.com and find the blog post entitled "Getting started with video marketing."
Another important factor with your outline is that you can determine the length of your video by reading it beforehand.
YouTube, for example, limits each video to 10 minutes.
Once you have your outline, it's time to shoot.
As for equipment, you can get a good camcorder these days for less than $500.
That might sound expensive, but you will amortize the cost over the number of videos you produce each year.
If you produce just one video a month, you're looking at about $42 a month over a year, an amount you might even be spending on Google AdWords each day.
And here's an important tip that I learned from a friend who's a documentary filmmaker.
People are more forgiving of poor visuals than they are of poor audio; this is particularly true for videos that are trying to solve their problems, as they often need to hear the solutions more than they need to see them.
So, if you have to cut costs, don't cut costs on audio; in fact, you should probably invest in a better microphone than the one that comes built into your camcorder.
Publish
Now to publishing.
I'm a big fan of multipurposing content
If you're spending time to produce a video, why just post it on YouTube?
Not only are there several other video sharing sites with good traffic, there's also your own website, where, if you provide relationship content in blogs and other formats, video could give your site awesome added value.
As for video sharing sites, YouTube, at least in North America, dominates.
So, if you're just going to pick one site, that's probably the one.
When you upload, here are some things to note:
- First, begin your description field with a link back to your website; to do this, make sure it starts with the http:// of the URL. YouTube will make the link clickable, and the link will appear in the truncated portion of the description when users view your video.
- Second, write a keyword-rich description that tells users about your video, so they can find it when searching.
- Third, enter keyword-rich tags that describe your content and relate to your business.
- Fourth, choose the right category for your video to ensure that people will find it.
- Fifth, consider carefully whether you'll allow comments and reply videos automatically, after approval, or not at all. To protect yourself, especially if you're new to YouTube, you probably want to only allow comments after approval.
For the description and tags fields, remember to max out your space; enter the most metadata you can in order to capture the widest range of viewers who will be interested in your video.
After you upload your video, you can copy and paste code to embed it into your own website, such as in a blog post that also contains your transcript.
There are some risks with this approach, such as the fact that YouTube's player will direct people to other videos after they finish watching yours.
But unless you have easy access to other ways of streaming video, this is the easiest approach, and one for which the benefits largely outweigh the risks.
Profit
Finally, profiting.
How are you going to profit from your videos?
Ultimately, you want to profit from your videos by:
- Creating awareness of your company and your offering.
- Demonstrating expertise and that you and your offering can address prospects' problems and needs.
- Driving traffic directly from video sharing websites to your own.
- Building relationships with existing prospects, customers and website visitors.
To achieve these goals, you'll need to promote your video, which you can do through email, social networking sites, social bookmarking sites and other outlets.
One of the important things to note about video sharing is that success breeds success; the more people who watch, comment, rate, embed and otherwise interact with your video, the more it will bubble up in search results on video sharing sites; in this way, popularity spurs more popularity.
And on that note, we've reached the end of this video.
There's obviously lots more to cover, such as ways to upload your video to multiple video sharing sites, and we'll address some of those in future.
For now, if you want more tips and tricks on web writing, online content and internet marketing, visit our website at Communemedia.com, and download our Breakthrough Web Writing e-book to create better online content and join our mailing list.