Thursday, April 23, 2009

Make Your Video's WORK for You





We all have heard from one source or another that putting a video on your web site will preform magic, by drawing customers attention, and possibly sales. Typically people will watch a video, because they are gathering information using two senses, sight and sound. Its sometimes easier to listen and watch someone show you something then to read about it. By putting a video on your web site it can make a surfer stay a few minutes longer, and if done properly, help create a new customer.



Making your Video
Its important to remember that this video that you put on your site, should be the best quality that you can make it. Its no different then your business card, or any other way you present yourself to new customers, Your video can be the first impression. Imagine watching a national television commercial, by one of the fortune 500 corporations, shot on a home video camera, with shaky images, Grey color, tinny sound, and poor lighting. They of course would not do that, because they have an image to uphold. Produce your video in a professional manor so that your prospective clients will see that you are a professional.



Hosting your Video
Now that you have your video, you need to put it on your web site. There are basically three ways to do this. The first is to upload and host it yourself. This can give you full control, especially being able to create your own custom video player. The second is by putting it on a UGC (user generated content) site, such as YouTube. At this time I can think of 31 different sites. The quality of these differ, and their restrictions also differ, but its free, and you can use the embedding text to put them on your site. You do have no control over the player and you will also have to put up with some advertisements. The third is to use a fee based SaaS site which you pay a monthly fee to host your videos. We like to upload our clients videos on the UGC sites for several reasons. There are several that do offer very good quality, along with no ads showing. Some even offer HD, but this does and can demand a lot of bandwidth. When we shoot a commercial, we shoot it in HD, and usually its converted to SD for local broadcast. When we upload it to various sites, we also make a HD master for some of the HD servers.



Making Your Video Work for You
Now its time to make that video work for you and drive customers to your web site. When encoding your video for the web, make sure you embed the video with lots of metadata. There are several software packages that will create special XMP files, developed by Adobe, which will actually embed keywords into the video itself. When the sites convert your file to flash, the data is not lost, and the search engines will actually find your video, along with your site. Your video can actually act as another web site for you. Try this, do a Google search for “Masipag Rice”. This is a video that we produced for a non-profit organization in the Philippines. This video was encoded with XMP files, and uploaded to 18 different UGC sites. You will find the first Google results will be videos. Google will even list the videos before actual sites with the word “Masipag” in the site name. If you do this properly you will find other sites, such as Mefeedia, and AOL will pick up your video and show it.
After you have encoded it properly, and uploaded it, you need to also embed it in social networks, blogs, and listing sites. You can show it on MerchantCircle, but unfortunately, they only allow links to YouTube. YouTube is ok, but you are stuck with their logo in your video, and the quality can suffer. There is a great site called Get Fave. You can go to http://www.getfave.com/ and get a free listing, and embed the video, from a site such as blipTV or DailyMotion, which will give you a high quality video, with a clean player and no ads, giving you a professional look. Get Fave is Google friendly, so if you have any questions about Get Fave, you can email Claude Palacios at: Claude@GetFave.com, and he will help you. The best part is that its free, and will help get that


video of yours to start working for you.



Start making your videos work for you