Creating a marketing video for your website can prove to be an extremely successful way in which to help not only promote your product or service, but also your website as a whole. For an online video to be effective, however, it is important to bear in mind well in advance exactly what it is that you are hoping to achieve, and exactly who your target audience really it is.

No television program ever begins filming until the producers are crystal clear as to exactly who their target audience will be. If you are not clear on the audience who will be watching your website video, then the video on your website will almost certainly represents a significant waste of your time and effort.

The style of your video should reflect the nature of the audience you are targeting. It could be that your video marketing techniques will aim entirely at the qualified and experienced professional, in which case your video should come across in a qualified and professional manner. On the other hand if your audience represents those people who may act in a more fickle and casual manner, then it is important that your video is designed in such a way as to capture and maintain their attention for as long as it is necessary in order to effectively pitch your product or service.

You may well have significant experience in sales techniques, and therefore assume that you are able to approach video marketing techniques for your website in the same way. Whilst your sales experience will certainly be valuable, for some people this can also be a handicap. The reason for this is that online video marketing techniques are a unique form of media with an audience that will be far more critical, and far more active in turning your video off if they are not impressed, convinced or entertained.

Bear the following fact clearly in mind when you are planning and preparing to create your online video: any embedded video in your website will need to have a button for the visitor to click in order to begin playing the video. The stop button will almost certainly be next to the play button, or at least very close by. This means that when the visitor clicks the mouse button to begin playing your video, their finger remains a single millimeter from clicking the button a second time, on the stop button that is so temptingly close.

Assuming that you can create an online video which is successfully able to capture and hold the attention of your target audience, how else can you take advantage of video marketing techniques to promote your product or service beyond the number of visitors who are actively coming to your website?

The answer is to try to create a marketing video which is so exciting and entertaining that those who visit your website, and view your advertising video, want to share that video with other people who may not yet have come across it. This is known as viral video marketing, and when it is successful, it is incomparable to all other forms of advertising, probably combined.

Because online videos can be shared so easily by any one, using video sharing sites such as YouTube for example, and because the Internet today widely encourages the sharing of links through social sites such as Facebook, or through the almost immeasurable number of blogs, once a video becomes popular, and becomes shared, it can spread incredibly quickly and incredibly easily, far beyond anything which you could possibly have achieved yourself.

As video marketing techniques go, viral videos are the ultimate success stories on the Internet today. However it is important to bear in mind again the fact that even being able to create a video which spreads widely in this manner does not guarantee sales. No matter how far and wide your video spreads, if it is not spreading to the audience you need to reach, then you will not see much significant increase in sales. This emphasizes the key point that for all video marketing techniques to work, the target audience must be known and kept in mind at every stage.

The truth is quite startling. Not only can creating online video to help market your product or service result in an astonishing increase in sales, helping to boost your conversion rate in a more successful way than any other form of advertising you may have invested in previously, but simply having a marketing or advertising video on your website can help to improve your business’s online presence and rating quite rapidly.

Although online video publishing is extremely straightforward, needing very little in the way of equipment, software or expertise, it is still relatively limited in its implementation, not only because of the fact that there are these widespread assumptions still being carried by many people, but also simply because of the fact that the technology is fairly new. It is only quite recently that broadband has become the standard way in which most people connect to the Internet. With faster and more reliable Internet connections websites are able to provide a greater variety of media, and provide customers and visitors with a more interactive and stimulating product pitch.

The major search engines, such as Google, are aware of the fact that this technology is still relatively cutting-edge. In order to help prioritize those websites which are likely to be more recently updated and relevant, websites which do have embedded video content will appear higher up the search results than those websites still using only text and images. Text on a webpage might well have been written yesterday, but equally might have been written several years ago. It is clear that video content can only have been produced and uploaded fairly recently, therefore these sites which do incorporate embedded video content will be deemed to be more relevant and more important.

You may well consider that online video publishing presents a very clear advantage from this fact alone. Certainly it is important to ensure that your website is rich in content, relevant and developed in a way which will appeal to the search engines in order to help place your website near the top of any search results page. But because so few people realize that Google prioritizes its search results based largely on the presence of video content, this is one way in which you can help boost the visibility of your online presence.

When you consider that creating a short video, and uploading it to the Internet, takes little more than a few minutes, or at most, less than a day’s work, the rewards from such an investment will almost certainly be greater than if you have spent the same amount of time writing yet more content, or submitting your site to yet more search engines.

But of course online video publishing is not simply about placement within search engine results. Certainly it is important to ensure that visitors find your website, but that in itself is not necessarily going to convert into a sale. An effective marketing video well placed on your website can certainly help to achieve this.

A great deal of thought needs to go into creating an online video for your website, since a poorly planned, poor quality video may well help to reduce your conversion rate rather than improve it. The golden rules to stick to include making sure that your video is short, punchy and highly entertaining. A long, boring slog through a tired sales pitch is more likely to encourage your visitors to go back to the search engines results, and view one of your competitors’ sites instead. This reaction is more likely than visitors simply stopping your video and resorting to reading the content on your site instead.

With an increasing emphasis on video content being available through video sharing websites such as YouTube, a greater number of visitors are not only expecting to see video content on some of the more professional websites, but are actually preferring this as a form of media. For this reason, online video publishing can help to make your website appear more relevant and up-to-date for your visitors as much as for the search engines.

Of all of the forms of media, the one that helps to create the most interest and engage people in the most active way is video. There are a number of reasons why using video online is more effective than any other advertising technique, but perhaps the single most reason is simply convenience. Given a straight choice between reading several hundred words on a webpage or sitting back and watching a little video for a minute or two, most people would tend to opt for the video.

It is this convenience factor which means that there is a greater likelihood of your video being actively watched, and visitors engaging with your advertisement than with them concentrating on large blocks of text or flashy, animated banner advertisements. Although it is still not widely used, creating an online video marketing campaign is something which will appeal to many Internet users in today’s digital climate.

With broadband Internet access now the standard way of connecting to the World Wide Web, creating and streaming video has become much more realistic, and incredibly popular with many Internet users. This is clear from the success of websites such as YouTube, a website which allows anyone with Internet access to upload a video that is then immediately available for global viewing.

In fact if you are thinking of using video online as a technique to help promote your goods or service, or simply help to promote the name of your business, then taking advantage of the fact that YouTube allows people to link to the videos and help promote them on your behalf can work in your favor.

Many online businesses who decide to create an online video advertisement assume from the very start that it is going to be a slick and professional video advertisement, that is in the same sort of style as a television advertisement. It is highly unlikely that a television style video advertisement would work successfully online. Although this is not always necessarily the case, and there are always going to be exceptions to the rule, Internet video marketing is a brand of video advertisement which should be considered to be quite distinct from that which is used in television and film.

One of the ways in which some businesses have found that using video online can work successfully is through taking advantage of what is sometimes referred to as viral video marketing. Viruses spread beyond the control of the original infection, and this might be considered to be something that is negative. However video viral marketing is quite different, and involves the mass publicity and promotion of a video through all sorts of online community and communication channels because of its popularity. There are a few examples of videos which have gained almost cult status, and have been linked to, shared and embedded within a whole range of websites, blogs and emails. This active and secondary promotion of a product or service is something which television advertisers can only dream of.

In order to make your experience of using video online successful and productive it is important to put a good deal of planning and forethought into how your video will be structured. The first thing to make sure is that, assuming that your visitor will click on your video and begin playing it, they will continue watching it and be interested in what you have to say, or what is taking place. Usually it is the case that within the first 5 to 10 seconds at most, those watching your video will make a judgment as to whether the remainder of your video is worth watching, or whether to simply close down your website and try a different result from Google.

It is for this reason that having a 10 second flashy animated introduction to your video is unwise, as is a fairly dull and static introduction that explains what the video is going to be about, a little like a teacher introducing a lesson to their students.

Approaching the idea of using video online as a form of media which is distinct from any other kind of media advertising is important, as is having a clear understanding of your target audience, where they come from and what they might be looking for.

There are many ways in which a product or service can be promoted or advertised online, some of which are extremely easy and relatively low cost, whereas others can prove far more challenging and even represent a significant initial cost or ongoing costs. From creating keyword dense content for your site to help improve its position within Google’s search results pages, to displaying adverts and advertising banners on other websites and blogs, there are many tried and tested methods which are likely to produce varying degrees of success.

But because a method of advertising your product or service online has been tried and tested does not always necessarily mean that it is going to be the most effective way of helping promote your site. One of the very newest methods being used by a number of successful online entrepreneurs and website businesses is internet video marketing. At its simplest level all this requires is a short video embedded into the main homepage of the website. When potential customers and visitors arrive at the site they should be able to see that there is a short video available, and be encouraged to play this video to find out more information.

But what is it that internet video marketing has to offer that other advertising methods and techniques can’t equal? Put quite simply, a thousand words may help your website to climb a little higher up Google’s search results list, a picture may paint a thousand words, and images and adverts in this format helped to get the message across much more clearly and visually. But a video may be many dozens of pictures, in addition to which you also have the ability to talk directly to your potential customers in a way which no static text or still picture could ever hope to achieve.

Potential customers can find tremendous reassurance from seeing a video of a product, or a video of somebody reviewing the product, or even yourself helping to explain a little more about the product or service that you are offering. An online video helps to create a more personal relationship between the potential customer and the retailer or service provider. This helps to very quickly create a feeling of trust and understanding, resulting in a much more significant increase in sales.

Of course if you are going to include internet video marketing as a method to help promote the sale of your product or service online, then it is important to make sure that you take full advantage of this opportunity by following a few simple basic rules.

The first rule is to make sure the video is clearly visible as soon as the visitor arrives at your website. Do not be tempted to hide your video on a separate page somewhere hidden deep within your website, in the hope that people will navigate to it. It is highly unlikely that any potential customer will bother to follow through several links in order to find your video. Internet video marketing its only successful when it becomes quick and easy to access.

The second rule to making sure that your internet video marketing technique proves to be successful in helping to promote your product or service online is to provide your potential customer or visitor with a good reason to play the video. This should not be too difficult to achieve, since most visitors will prefer for you to explain about your product or service in a quick video rather than for them to have to read several pages and navigate several links in order to find out that same information from themselves.

Once you have managed to encourage the customer or visitor to click on your video then it is very important to make sure that the video has been constructed in such a way as to hold their attention and encourage them to buy your product, find out more about your product, or contact you for more information. If you follow these three basic rules then your internet video marketing project should prove to be a very successful and profitable venture.

A website video is not going to miraculously turn around an almost invisible online presence within a few days, but as with any form of advertising it should be used as part of a planned marketing campaign which helps draw on all of the different strengths from the various forms of advertising which you choose to use.

The first challenge is simply to ensure that people discover your website. There are ways in which this can be encouraged through advertising in the real world, for example, through the publicity of your website address on television, radio, posters and so forth. If, like so many other businesses with an online presence, you are solely and entirely a virtual business, whose presence is completely within the bounds of the Internet and the World Wide Web, then it is important to consider how you are going to encourage potential customers to arrive at your website, so that they have a chance to view your website video.

Almost certainly one of the techniques you will use will be to maximize the relevance and popularity of your website, so that it rises up through the ranks of Google’s search results pages, hopefully appearing on the first page. It is a fairly widely known fact that of all people who search using Google, 97% of people never look beyond the first page of results. There is no point spending a great amount of time and effort creating a fabulous website video that can’t fail to convert a visit into a sale, if nobody ever discovers your website exists because you’re on page two, or worse, of Google’s lists.

Using hundreds or thousands of words to maximize the relevance of your website will help you achieve first page ranking with Google, but words alone are unlikely to convince many visitors to purchase your product or service. Website visitors are often referred to as surfers, and since those surfers who enjoy their watersports rarely find themselves staying motionless in one place for very long at a time, so Internet surfers tend to be extremely fickle, with short attention spans, and itchy fingers ready to click on to the next website.

It is said that a picture can paint a thousand words, and almost certainly your website will include images, photographs, diagrams and even graphs to show the value that your product or service can offer. Similarly you may also use images as part of your advertising campaign, having graphical and even animated banner advertisements published on various other web sites and blogs. Visual adverts may well help to encourage visitors to view your site, and once they have arrived at your website, a few well-placed images can make a great deal of difference.

But it is impossible to escape the fact that even two or three very clear images cannot convey everything that you want to say to your potential customers, and you will have to accept that a great deal of significant information will be left out from these images. Relying on your visitors to read all of the text provided on the page may well be unwise. This is why having a website video can make the difference between a sale, and surfer riding the next wave all the way to your competitor’s website.

A website video is able to actively engage with the visitor in a way which no textual image can possibly achieve. An online video is able to cram into 30 seconds, or a minute, far more than your potential customer would have taken on board in five minutes left to browse your website on their own. Additionally, having your own website video allows you to put a real face to your product or service, which helps to create a sense of trust and honesty that is more likely to result in a sale.

Of course there are many ways in which a website video or online marketing campaign can shoot itself in the foot, most particularly by you publishing a 10 or 15 minute video which takes them an hour and a half to download if they don’t have broadband, and is likely to bore them to tears and frustration. Your marketing video needs to be short, snappy and above all relevant and exciting.

If this is the case then you are certainly not alone, and this is almost certainly the reason why so few websites these days include video content. Considering the ease with which it is possible to create and upload video content, and the tremendous advantages of being able to include such content on a website, it is surprising that it is still fairly rare to find such content available. Of the video content which is available, a significant portion of it is a complete waste of time. For this reason it is important that you understand clearly how best to go about creating your advertising video, and how best to distribute and promote it.

The one thing that you will not need to do is to go out and purchase and expensive video camera and costly software to help edit and construct the video. Certainly it is possible to spend many hundreds, or even thousands of pounds, purchasing the equipment, but perfectly professional and highly successful videos have been created using little more than either a WebCam or basic digital video camera costing under £100.

As far as video editing software is concerned, almost certainly the operating system on your computer already has a perfectly satisfactory video editing package bundled with it. If you are running Microsoft Windows, then the Moviemaker, which is supplied as part of the Windows operating system, will allow you to create a perfectly slick and professional looking video which will certainly achieve your aims.

So what should your video be about? This is difficult, because a great deal will depend upon the nature of the business or service that you are offering. Some of the worst advertising video content available is little more than a salesman pounding the innocent customer with as much information as possible in an attempt to push the sale. Pushy and over enthusiastic salesman may well have success in some fields, but it is important to bear in mind that any online video remains constantly a single click from being stopped. It is important to imagine when planning and creating your advertising video that you visualize the finger of every single potential visitor to your website hovering a fraction of an inch above their mouse button for every single second of your video. You must give the visitor every good reason to keep their finger up. Drop your focus, become repetitive or start pushing and hundreds or thousands of fingers will drop upon their mouse buttons.

Rather than using a salesman to push the product, one successful method that you could try to use is to have an independent person reviewing your product or service. Whether this person genuinely is independent or not is something that potential customers are unlikely to question. As long as the video appears to be genuine it is unimportant who it is who is actually reviewing your product or service. Potential customers will pay more attention to somebody who is independently reviewing a product than a salesman who is clearly going to be biased.

Even more successful are those videos which are surprising and unexpected. Incorporating humor is also likely to be very successful. In order to maximize the success of your advertising video you might consider creating video content which will promote your website far beyond being simply a static part of your own website viewed only by those who happen to visit it. If your video is interesting, funny, surprising and genuinely different from other videos available online, you may well find a significant number of people linking to your video and sharing it, either using links embedded within social networks sites such as Facebook, or video sharing sites such as YouTube.

This secondary promotion and proliferation of your advertising video is clearly out of your hands, but to the business who can create a video which is likely to encourage this kind of publicity, the rewards are outstanding. Since every second of your promotional video will be created with a vision of poised fingers clearly in mind, you will not wish to have it any longer than is absolutely necessary, and keeping your video short and to the point is of critical importance.

No matter how hard you try to push your business higher and higher up the ranks of Google’s search results pages, once your visitors arrive at your website you still have the task of trying to sell or promote your product or service. Offering them a web page crammed with information, mostly text with perhaps some graphs or images, can seem fairly overwhelming to a potential customer or visitor. Many websites make the mistake of having too much textual information about the product or service on the very first page, hoping that potential customers and visitors will take the time, and make the effort, to read most of this information.

The truth is that most website visitors are actually very lazy. This is evident by the way in which Google search results pages tend to be used. 97% of those who use Google to search for a website never look beyond the first page of results. Once they click to a webpage, the Google heat-map shows that they focus on the headline and some of the text and adverts, but 80% tend not to scroll down below the fold (the visible part of the screen).

It is these facts and others that help us to understand that if we want a website to be effective in what is was designed for, it is necessary to catch interest immediately: within that two to three seconds that it takes for a visitor to either stay or go. Your web page or video must catch attention immediately, and not rely on people hitting keys.

This is where internet video marketing comes into its own. A well placed online marketing video, that is immediately evident to anybody who happens to visit the website, can engage with potential customers far more quickly and effectively than any number of words and images which you choose to post on your website.

Why do you think that YouTube is one of the most popular and used websites on the internet? Why are an increasing number of people putting their videos on MySpace and Facebook? In fact, why are these social networking sites going to the expense of offering video facilities to their members at all? Why is so much online video editing software being sold online, and the hardware to shoot the videos? Why are so many people making a fortune by marketing internet video eBooks?

Because people prefer video to audio! Were that not true then radio would be more popular than TV. Radio is popular, but it is a fact that most radio programs are listened to when or where it is not possible to watch TV. At work, in cars or at home in the morning and afternoon when people do not have the time to sit and watch through a whole TV program.

There is no denying that video is king, and you can use that fact to your marketing advantage.
Of course simply having a video on your website is not enough to be a success. You should consider making it auto-play so that it starts when your prospect hits your page. To do that your marketing video must be compelling or it could be counter-productive.

If not, you have to give your customer a very good reason to click on the video and play it. People are not going to click play on a video if they suspect that you’re going to give them a 20 minute sales pitch. You have to give them a clear idea of the length of the video and what it will teach them. People want information, not to be sold to.

You, on the other hand, want to sell to them, but the old adage concerning ’softly softly’ and ‘catching monkeys’ always works online better than the hard sell. It might be difficult to close the door on a real salesman once he is in your home, but it’s really easy to click away from a website or switch off an online video. You might also consider offering a carrot and suggesting that within the video they will be given the code for a 10% discount or some other benefit not available on the website itself.

Once you have persuaded the prospect to play the video, your next task is to ensure that they continue watching it. The first 20 to 30 seconds of a marketing video are likely to decide whether or not your prospects watch the remaining part of the video, or close your website and go elsewhere.

With a simple web page it’s more like 2 – 3 seconds, but people tend to take longer to watch a video, particularly if it starts automatically rather than requiring them to take some action to start the video playing. Article marketing, with a note in the resource that the link will offer a video, is an ideal way of leading into a video that begins to play without further action on behalf of the visitor, and there are others. However without that pre-warning, it might be better to describe the video on your webpage and then offer them an inducement to play it.

Internet video marketing can enable you to market your business using a technique that is rapidly becoming one of the most effective online marketing techniques thanks to YouTube and other video social networking sites. Using video marketing techniques you can reach an audience that would otherwise have been inaccessible to you.

One of the techniques that the most successful of your competitors will probably be using is online video advertising, which is the placing of promotional and explanatory videos either within the website itself, or promoting the brand through the publication and distribution of a marketing video in any one of the video sharing sites available, as YouTube.

But what is it about online video advertising which makes this such a revolutionary and successful form of promotion? There are many reasons, but perhaps one of the most significant, and perhaps also one of the most obvious, is the fact that distribution and availability of video online is still relatively new and cutting edge. Until quite recently the idea of streaming video content on your website would be considered almost absurd. Two things have changed to turn that situation around.

The first is the fact that a greater number of people now have fast Internet access. Broadband Internet access is now the standard method that people use to connect to the Internet, and as such, richer and more varied media content can be viewed and distributed.

The second reason why video content has become far more available and expected, is because the technology and equipment needed to create a video and then upload it is accessible to even the most basic and humble of set-ups. Even a basic home user will often have a WebCam that comes as part of their computer package, and really little more than this is required. For relatively small sums of money you can purchase digital video cameras which will be able to produce video content for your website of an excellent quality. As far as software is concerned, most operating systems now come with basic video editing software, and little more than this is required by the majority of people.

Because of the ease of creating online video advertising you might imagine that a huge number of people are starting to incorporate this form of promotion within their website straight away. In fact this is not the case, and is still relatively rare to find a website which does have video content embedded within it to help communicate directly with visitors and potential customers.

Of those websites and companies that are using online video advertising, or other forms of video content, not all have managed to get it right. Simply recording a video, embedding it into your website and uploading it for the world to see is unlikely to result in an increase in sales, or an increase in interest. Naturally the first challenge that you will face is ensuring that visitors actually find your website. Fortunately, embedding video content into your website encourages Google to view your website as being more modern and likely to be more relevant. As a result, Google will increase the priority and positioning of your website with its results, helping you to draw attention to your website.

Once visitors have arrived at your website the next challenge is encouraging them, and giving them a reason, to click on the video and watch it. This should not be too difficult so long as you follow two basic rules. The first rule to encouraging a visitor to view your online video advertising is to tell them in advance how long the video it is. People who are familiar with viewing videos online, such as on YouTube, will expect to be able to see how long the video is, in order help judge whether it is worthwhile investing in the time to watch it. Keeping the video to thirty seconds, one minute, or perhaps at most two minutes, and informing the customer clearly that this video will not take them long, will almost certainly help encourage the majority of people to watch your video content.

The second rule to encouraging people to click on your online video advertising is to give them a reason for wanting to watch it. Emphasizing the fact that this will help explain your product or service clearly and quickly, saving the reading of several web pages, is a good start. Another method that some have tried is to suggest that there is an extra benefit provided within the promotional video, such as an extra discount code.

But no matter how successful the positioning of your website within Google’s search results is, and how successful you are at encouraging people to view your online video advertising, you will still not managed to achieve any greater number of sales if the video content itself is not slick, exciting and worth the time to watch it.

You may possibly already know something about online video marketing and what it actually is, or you may have some idea. At its simplest level, online video marketing is simply the embedding of a video into your website that acts as an advert or form of promotion for the products or services which you are seeking to sell. This sounds very simple, but there are a number of ways in which you can help to maximize the success of any video campaign which you decide to pursue.

Clearly the video itself needs to be highly successful and extremely targeted. It is easy to imagine that you will need to enlist the support of expensive recording equipment and editing software so that your online video appears as professional and slick as possible. Whilst there is certainly a place for such professional videos, it is not always in the best interest of an online business or service provider to invest such enormous amounts of money and time into creating a professional online video. In fact very often it can be the very videos which seem fairly unprofessional or even amateurish which achieve the greatest success.

You can see how this might be possible through the relatively recent, but nonetheless enormously successful, interest and enthusiasm in online video sharing communities such as YouTube and Facebook. Websites such as these allow anybody to be able to upload a short video and have that immediately published so that anybody in the entire world is able to view that video straight away. There are three advantages in being able to use a service such as on this.

The first advantage is simply that using a service such as YouTube means that your video or videos can be uploaded immediately at no cost whatever to you. This is particularly useful for those who are just starting out, or those who only have a small online business or very little budget as far as online advertising is concerned.

The second advantage is that you know the audience browsing videos on YouTube are actively looking for videos. It will be very rare indeed to find anybody who watches television in order to actively look for an advert. Although this does happen, it only occurs very rarely. People browsing YouTube will be actively looking to watch videos and if your video has the appropriate key words and interest which is likely to appeal to potential customers, then you have the perfect platform to launch your product promotion.

The third advantage of using YouTube or another similar service to promote your video is what is called the viral video effect. Increasingly those people who have branched into online video marketing have discovered the impact that the viral marketing or viral video marketing can achieve. Very occasionally a video will appear on YouTube or another related service which rapidly builds in popularity. This is possible because of the ability to share videos and links to videos through all manner of other services and platforms.

Links in e-mails, the embedding of YouTube video links in other web pages, and even the inclusion of links to these videos in profiles on Facebook or in any number of blogs all help to promote your video. Once the video begins to garner interest and becomes shared it begins to spread far beyond the original bounds of the advertising campaign. Effectively, your potential customers and those who are watching your advert become actively involved in promoting your product or service for you.

Of course this effect cannot be guaranteed, although there are things that can be considered when planning your online video marketing campaign in order to help this become more likely. Being able to create a video which is surprising, humorous, and significantly different from the sort of advert normally seen on television, can help you significantly. It is also more often the case that videos which appear to have been recorded by someone at home, to an amateur standard, tend to find themselves the subjects of viral video activity far more than the professionally filmed marketing videos, and this is worth bearing in mind when considering the approach to take.