Traffic for beginners: Video Marketing

Traffic for beginners: Video Marketing Video Marketing for beginnersBeginners guide to creating traffic with video marketingLet’s face it: it’s a big Internet out there, with millions and millions of websites. How are you going to get people to come to yours?Video Marketing – The FutureThe overriding reason that you should be starting to build your video marketing efforts now is that it is definitely going to be the fastest growing sector of the online promotional market for the foreseeable future. I believe that advances are going to be both large and rapid.For example, the technology for embedding a clickable link into a video that you post on YouTube are not yet perfected, but there is little doubt that they will be so soon.After that, it will simply be a matter of time and a bit of extra coding to move us from clickable links to automatic redirects that will take you straight to the website in question as soon as the video has ended.As video technology develops, so will the complexity of websites like YouTube and Google Video, and no doubt that at some point the big websites will begin charging to accept ‘commercial’ videos too. At that time, it will no longer be possible to post cheaper or less sophisticated videos with any realistic chances of success, unless you have already established your brand image and reputation by getting into this market now.That is why you should not sit on the video fence one moment longer!Using video to get your sales message across is definitely the fastest growing sector of the online promotional market at this present moment in time.  There is little doubt that it is a business very much so in its infancy.Why? Well consider these facts about YouTube alone, to get some idea of the massive potential of video websites:• More than 65,000 new videos are uploaded every day• YouTube serves up 200 million video clips every day• YouTube is one of the 5 most popular websites in the world!Basically, the way that YouTube works is that you make an interesting short video and then you upload it for free to the YouTube website. And that really is all there is to it. As long as you do the job properly.  Meaning your video is good enough. It can literally start attracting viewers in seconds!  Some of the more popular videos on YouTube are seen by millions of viewers.  Don't fret, there is still some unmined potential in using YouTube (and other video websites).So, let us assume that you use a webcam or video camera to make a short video. What you then need to do is to add some thing to the movie to make sure that it can drive people to your website. You do this by using the Windows Movie Maker software that is often found on Windows driven PC’s.Use any of these programs that work for you to create a short movie that carries your website URL at the beginning of the movie for a few seconds. That immediately tells the viewer that there is a website that has something to do with the people behind the video production.Next, if you can (or if the software that you are using will allow it) put a ‘watermark’ in the movie that can continue to show your URL as unobtrusively as possible for the full length of the movie. If you cannot do this, it is not critical, so, no matter, but, if you can, then that is even better.Finally, end the movie with the same URL being shown and a clear call to action as well. It will simply not work just showing the URL – you must TELL the viewer what you want them to do next!So, maybe the final ‘frame’ would show something like ‘Now, Go IMMEDIATELY To ABC.com’. Note that you want to “tell” people what to do, you do not want to “ask”!And that’s it for the movie. It does not need to be any more complicated or complex than this.Okay, so that is how you send somebody to view your website once they have found your video, but how do you ensure that they actually find the video in the first place?Well, a bit like the Social Bookmarking websites that we will look at later, YouTube (and all the other free video upload websites) work on a system of ‘tags’ that act as key search words for the site. So, what you need to do is to make sure that the tags that you add to your video are going to be those that people find. In other words, you must use key tags that match popular search terms in order to give yourself the greatest chance of someone finding your video.Now, YouTube is a website where most people are still pretty much amateurs at the tagging ‘game’, and so the competition that you are facing is not so hot. So, do not make life difficult for yourself by trying to reinvent the wheel.Find the super-popular videos and simply copy as much as you can from each one that you find in terms of their tags and so on. For example, you will find that some categories are much more popular than others. Remember, above all else, people want to be entertained, so if you can somehow ‘shoehorn’ your video into the ‘Comedy’ or “Entertainment’ categories, then do so, as those are very popular indeed!Anything that is ‘funny’, ‘weird’, ‘inspirational’, ‘shocking’, ‘sexy’ or ‘gross’ works well too! However, as some of those may not be that easy to apply to an internet marketing related video, then you should also be happy to know that ‘instructional’ and ‘demonstrates’ are pretty hot tags too!Don’t forget other places that you can use your tags too, such as when you create a ‘Custom Channel’. Just take a quick look at the other channels that YouTube carries, and you will quickly see that none of them are at all ‘tag optimized’, so if you do that, you can give yourself a huge advantage.The final opportunity that YouTube presents to you is that you can take any video from the site, and simply ‘copy & paste’ one line of code to ‘embed’ the video into your WP blog site. Thus, in a matter of seconds, you can add your own video (or someone else’s) to your blog.  This adds a vital element of action and additional interactivity.And, of course, once your video is created and optimized for YouTube, then you can submit the same video to any of the large number of other video upload websites that can be found on the Internet. The other “big three” are: Yahoo Video, Google Video and into the video section of MySpace.The great thing about using videos to promote your website is that, despite the fact that more and more marketers are doing it every day, the market is, in fact, still pretty much wide open. The competition is still very limited, and the competition that is actually doing a good job is even less.So, now is a perfect time to try to establish a significant presence in the video market by, creating a series of similarly themed and recognizable video that are very clearly ‘yours’. Video is the perfect medium for building a ‘brand’ name and image for both your business and your products, and there really could be no better time than now to begin doing so.