How to get your share of the Video Traffic Boom
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.
I’m not knocking PCC here. It’ still a valid method to drive traffic to a site and one which I continue to see success with. The trend is however towards video, so we either go along or we get left behind.
Producing a marketing video isn’t in itself a complicated procedure or one that requires hugely complex and expensive software applications. The various software components required for video production shouldn’t cost more than a few hundred dollars in total.
What can be complicated and leave us open to costly errors is the way we go about marketing our videos. One way is to produce a marketing video for our product or the affiliate product we promote and simply submit this to the various video hosting sites such as Revver, YouTube or Metaface to name just a few.
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.
As all video sites categorize the submitted videos, we could well be embedding videos from a competitor in our own website. Not always the best idea, as we end up giving free exposure and advertising to this competitor.
The best way is to convert our videos to flash and to add this flash video to our websites. To do this we need effective and reliable video conversion software.
Videos generally include large volumes of information and tend to be large files. YouTube has a 10 minute and 100 MB maximum for any video submitted to the site, so this gives a good indication of the kind of file sizes I’m talking about.
Converting a video to flash does require time and computer resources. If we are working on a single computer system, the our hands are tied while the conversion takes place.
Time is a valuable commodity and not something we can afford to waste. Video is a valuable marketing tool and not something we can afford to ignore. Get the best combination of time and result and your online marketing efforts can be that much more profitable.
All too often I see people investing big money in the latest and greatest video production software, without thinking about the marketing of the videos they produce. Usually they end up with amazing videos that nobody ever sees. Why? Because they didn’t consider the conversion stage.
The top class converters I use cost less than $100. Low quality converters come in at around $70. Does that price difference merit time and frustration? Not for me and neither should it for you.
