You know videos on the Web are compelling. You’ve watched them on YouTube, shared links with friends, maybe even posted one or two to your Facebook page. You’ve seen them returned as page one results on Google and heard people say that video is the new killer app.
With high-speed Internet available throughout the US and beyond, video delivered over the Web is a powerful sales and marketing tool.
But is creating a video and uploading it to YouTube enough? How can you maximize the potential impact of your video?
This article’s aim is to show you how to leverage your video through blogs and social media to reach the widest possible audience.
1. Create your video. It could be a tour of the factory floor, a product demo, an interview with employees or customers, or a screen capture that shows how to use a piece of software. In short, anything that would be useful, interesting, funny or, in a word, compelling to your customer base.
For example, I did a series of how-to videos about Twitter, the popular microblogging platform, which targeted my audience of small business owners and entrepreneurs. This in turn got me a lot more “followers” on Twitter that further extended my reach.
Don’t worry about making your video long enough; worry about making it short enough. Two minutes is perfect, five minutes is long and ten minutes is an eternity. People don’t have the time or patience to watch a long video on the Web.
Your video can be saved in a number of different formats, including mov, avi, wmv, mpg, mp4, flv and m4v. Since many video sharing sites limit video size to 100MB you should, too.
Make sure you include contact information in the video such as your URL so people can make contact with you.
2. Upload your video through TubeMogul.com. TubeMogul allows you to submit your pièce de résistance to multiple video sharing Web sites such as YouTube, Howcast, Vimeo and a dozen others. TubeMogul saves you time and provides metrics for all these sites.
3. Blog it. Write a blog post about the video topic and embed the video within your post. You can use the embed code from any of the video sites, but I tend to use YouTube. YouTube counts views wherever your video is shown and this can help the general “findability” of your video, especially since Google seems to favor YouTube as a video source.
4. Create a HubPage. HubPages.com is a site where you can create hubs (pages) on any topic you like, embed videos, and create outbound links. After you have created your 3rd hub your outbound links carry link juice, so be sure to link to your Web site, blog, Twitter account, and more.
Use HubPages as another channel to distribute your video, but don’t use the exact same content that you used on your blog; instead, mix it up a bit. This will give you more opportunity to rank well for your best keywords.
5. Tweet it and update your status. Using your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social media accounts, update your status with a link to the video, blog or HubPage so that your friends and followers know about your video and can easily check it out.
You may also want to post the video directly to your Facebook profile or your business fan page.
6. Create an “Ultimate Guide” of all your related videos at Squidoo.com. Squidoo is a lot like HubPages except your pages are called “lenses” here. In fact, feel free to use Squidoo first and HubPages now. The point is by placing your “ultimate guide” on another network, you’ll be reaching a new audience.
Put all your related videos on “dog training”, “fly fishing” or “levitation for beginners” on one long page at Squidoo. Search engines (and people) love focused content.
7. Tweet your ultimate guide and update your status, redux. Don’t worry that some people may have already seen your videos when you released them individually; it’s unlikely anyone saw all of them. If your videos provide value people will want to see them.
In Conclusion
Videos are a compelling part of any online marketing campaign, and can be created for any budget. Just make sure to leverage your hard work by following this road map for maximum exposure.
If you’d like to talk to someone about how to use video or build a online marketing campaign for your business, contact flyte today.
--Rich Brooks
President, flyte new media
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