Video Marketing - (Including YouTube.com)

Thanks to YouTube.com, (#4 in Alexa currently, Still going up!) online Video is “in” right now in a major way.

All you need to do to grab some of this traffic is to make your own simple video on your niche’s topic.

It doesn’t even have to be a music video or a well scripted video… Nor a big budget video or heck, even an interesting video. Like everything else in Marketing, attaching the right Keywords to your video will get it found. And in your video, much like an Article or a Podcast, you simply present a “Call to Action” that gets them to click over to your website.

Even Better… With Camtasia you can simply set the movie to automatically re-direct them to your website when it’s finished!

Videos can also be used on your site as content, which in fact is a great use for them… Video is the highest form of content on the web right now, as proven by YouTube. However, for our purpose here today, you should come to think of making videos as the same thing as writing articles… Plus a little bit of a software learning curve.

Camtasia is still the best tool for making these desktop videos, but it costs a whopping $299 for a single user license and doesn’t show any sign of coming down soon. For a Desktop-film-capture-only version that will help windows & Linux users make the similar product without all the extra effects, there is the totally free “Wink” by DeBugMode.

Wink actually makes smaller files with higher resolution than Camtasia, but it is limited to only making desktop video, (as opposed to using any video camera recordings) and Wink is a little difficult to learn. Still, paired with Microsoft’s free Windows Movie Maker software, you can do just about anything at all that you could with Camtasia, all for free.

What should you make a movie about? Well, it almost doesn’t matter. But for the sake of producing good content that people will tell their friends about and help build you extra traffic, ask yourself what you can do on your desktop that people in your niche market might find useful.

Anything at all… I’m making one now about how to select keywords. If you’re in a math-oriented niche, whip out MS-Calc.exe and talk about your computation while using the calculator on screen. Artists? Surely you have a writing tablet on your PC… You can teach techniques for drawing while showing them in real time what the drawings are.

Videos made with screen-capture movies are easy to produce, and if you know your niche, simple to write. Perhaps one day our standards will all be higher, but if you’ve spent more than an hour YouTubing, then you’ll agree that the majority of the content out there is really low-end stuff. Hollywood directors need not apply.

So make your desktop videos, name them with a keyword, open a YouTube account and upload them, tagging them with all of your relevant keywords… The Traffic is already there and you could see hundreds or even thousands of people watching your film short before the morning!

There are already tons of smaller YouTube knock-offs popping up out there, so perhaps one of them will be focused on your niche. If not, then you can stick with YouTube alone until one does pop up.

How to find them? There are tons of ways. Google’s video search will pull up quite a few for just about any keyword you search already, but finding isn’t nearly as difficult, or more to the point time-consuming, as Submitting your works.

Think of it this way… Videos regularly run between 1 to 10 megabytes… If you want to upload that video to all of the video services out there (there are umpteen hundred of them already!) then you’ll be spending a LOT of time doing nothing but uploading and picking your tags.

So it’s important to get some automation going, and for that purpose I use Video Traffic Assistant. VTA is a free service where you can submit to nine video services, including YouTube, completely automated… Just pick your tags once per film, and it logs you into all nine accounts and uploads it for you at the press of a button. You don’t even have to sit around waiting on the uploads to finish! If it only included GoogleVideo, I might be able to settle for those nine alone. {Sigh}

Still, it’s free, and you’ll learn about the important aspects of video marketing if you use it a few times.

Finally, there’s one last important aspect of video marketing. We all know that if the film is really funny or amazing, that alone can get it picked up and passed around very easily… But let’s face it; we just want to use this service for our commercials, right? Desktop video probably isn’t going to cause a major stir online, no matter how cute your logo is.

For the average video, we really should develop a little more strategy to get your video seen.

Two easy ways to get your video viewed more often is by leaving comments on other people’s videos with a little note for them to check yours out, and by inviting friends with similar interests to the topic of your video.

Naturally, these can both be very time consuming if done by hand, and you’d really have to be making a full-time go of it to get the average film viewed quite often doing those manually.

So naturally, someone invented a YouTube “Popularity tool,” called The Tubeinator. It comes with a free trial with no restraints except a time limit. I suggest you try it simply for the sake of learning this technique of building your YouTube popularity, if nothing else.

Yes, there is a lot to learn about video marketing, I know... Make the film, submit the film, and then make the film popular… Whew! –That’s easily the scariest tactic to pull off in this whole eBook. However, if you consider that YouTube is the #4 website on the internet, copied by countless others that all have decent traffic too, and that pretty much everyone in all walks of life enjoys watching films there, then you can easily see why it’s worthwhile to use this important medium.

The kids of today are learning to YouTube as soon as they can talk… Pretty soon they’ll skip that whole, unnecessary ‘reading’ step altogether!