The emphasis on web video continues to increase exponentially. Many business owners are spending significant time and money on video. They believe that just by adding videos to the web it will create new sources of traffic to their websites. The actual reality is quite different and very few efforts result in a positive return on investment.
It is critical that your content has some kind of impact. Most videos produced for business owners are simply boring. Even if they have an important message, they fail to hold the interest of the viewer long enough to deliver it. The very best videos have at least three of the following attributes:
If your video is intended to provide instruction or convince the visitor they need to buy something, you need to convince your audience that the person presenting your message is actually an authority. Avoid using your husband/wife, girlfriend/boyfriend, or the cute girl/guy next store to deliver your message. If your message is about the best way to keep your skin looking young, then an aesthetician (skin care professional) or a dermatologist would be the best choice. However, there can be a trade-off when professionals are forced to deliver content that is not particularly entertaining. Unfortunately, the phrase “what this party needs is a few more dermatologists” is rarely spoken.
Quality is always a huge factor in the success of a video. There are many measures of quality that include not just the production value, but all the other attributes of the video (mentioned above). However, to measure how good your video really is, you need to ask yourself the following questions: Would you send this video to your mother (or colleague, valued customer, etc.)? Is this video good enough to be featured on the home page of your website? If you are proud of it and are willing to share it with others, the quality is probably pretty good.
Most visitors on the web have appallingly short attention spans. They expect nearly instant gratification and have very little patience when it comes to viewing videos. The title needs to grab them and it is critical that every video delivers some kind of punch in the first 30 seconds. If the content really requires a long-winded explanation, it better be very entertaining and sprinkled with revelations throughout. If the core message needs to be repeated more than one or two times, then the video is too long. Keep it short and simple.
Business owners think that the worst thing that can happen when they commission a video is that no one will watch it. Unfortunately, that is not true. Sharing a mediocre video with your existing email subscribers is a great way to push the ones that are on the fence to unsubscribe. In addition, sprinkling mediocre content around the web can lead to serious brand erosion. Once the content is out there, it ican be difficult to control and remove.
Even when the content is perfect, nearly all videos fail unless they are marketed properly. This is the single biggest mistake made by business owners and their video producers. They allocate a big budget for production and nothing for marketing. Unless you already have a sizable audience and you are sharing a new concept/product with them, your video has little or no chance of being successful.
They are several ways to effectively market your video:
Social Media – Presenting a good video to your existing audience through Facebook, Twitter, or email will not initially get you more new visitors, but if the quality and content of your video is good, you existing audience will share it with their like-minded friends and this can have dramatic results. More importantly, if you have a more professional audience (bloggers, frequent forum participants, and website owners) that can lead to valuable permanent links to your video (which enhances search).
Web Properties – Posting your video in prominent places within your own website and or other friendly websites not only exposes the video to the right audience, but also will enhance the performance of the video in the search results. This is why quality is so important. No one wants to post a mediocre video on the home page their website.
Video Sharing Websites – It is a common practice to post videos on multiple video platforms such as YouTube, Yahoo Video, etc. These platforms have search capabilities built into them and a properly configured video will get some traffic. However, this is actually a very small component of overall viewership; the ultimate goal is to have the video perform well in organic search. Too many business owners rely solely on video sharing websites and fail miserably. If you build it, they will NOT come. It just doesn’t work that way.
Organic Search – This is certainly the most poorly understood marketing component. Just posting a video on YouTube and expecting it to show up prominently in the Google video search results for phrases that actually have traffic is incredibly naïve. You might get the video to show up for some long-tail phrases that have little or no competition and traffic, but that is all. It is critical that your video is exposed to the web community and it is popular enough that other webmasters want to link to it. Those links increase the authority of the video in the eyes of Google and the more quality links you have, the better the video will perform.
If you really build a good video it has a chance to become viral. A viral video catches the interest of the web community and can become incredibly popular in just a few days. If the video is structured and presented well it can generate significant traffic for the website. However, more importantly the video itself will acquire links from other sites and perform well in organic search. The two common elements in all viral videos are that they are unique and entertaining. If your video does not have those elements it will never become viral.
One of my favorite examples of viral video can be found here at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPKtBM99kAc. The presenter is Vince and in his apron within the kitchen setting he appears as an authority on cooking. He is certainly entertaining, the content is unique, useful, fun and leaves me wanting to learn to cook so I can justify buying a “Slap Chop”! This specific video has nearly a million views, but there are dozens of others (it has been posted to YouTube many times) and the total viewership is well over 20 million. I suspect that this is a very successful product!
Aside from initially deciding to create a video, the next big mistake business owners make is that they fail to have a plan to measure the success of the video. There are many ways to measure success. These include viewer counts on the video hosting sites and using Google Analytics to track referring websites. If you create a video and you do not focus on content, quality, and marketing, be prepared for disappointment.
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