5 Ideas for Creating and Marketing Your Videos on Your Website

1. Promote a Product or Service

Instead of doing the usual text explanation of your product(s) and/or service(s) that may take several lines of boring text, why not demonstrate them on video? Just imagine how useful a video would be to make it easy for your website visitors to figure out exactly what it is your company does or sells?

2. Provide Happy Client Testimonials

One of the strongest marketing tools you can use to promote your business is to provide word-of-mouth testimonials. The impact of happy customers describing the wonderful service you provide on your site's home page is definitely worth the small effort to create the video. Using a simple FlipTM Video or other video camera on a tripod, you can produce a fairly decent video to place on your site. If you are still a bit nervous about producing the video yourself, there are many companies that provide this service at competitive prices locally.

3. Demonstrate How a Product Works

Why not demonstrate how a particular product works, especially if you receive a lot of phone calls to your company about this issue? Your instruction booklet may not be enough. Many people prefer to have something shown to them directly and visually.

4. Introduce Yourself and Your Employees

Make sure you portray yourselves professionally and don't forget to smile when talking! If you are a local company and expect visitors of your web site to visit your company in person, think about how they would want to be treated and carry that over onto your web site video introductions. Is there an employee with a special talent that is relative to your company? Show some of the personality of your employees.

5. Walk Through Your Company

Create a virtual tour of your company, especially if the physical location is an important part of your company's product or service, such as an ice cream parlor or amusement park. Or, if you manufacture special "widgets" and the manufacturing process is part of the charm of the product, why not video a part of that?

Whatever reason or reasons you choose to add video to your web site, make it fun, informative and, above all else, engaging to entice your visitors to want to stay on your site and tell others about it (make it "viral").

5 Facts About Having Video on Your Website or Blog

1. It Increases the Amount of Visitors (Traffic) to Your Site and Improves Your Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

When your website contains a video, your web designer includes important industry keywords, phrases and your website or blog URL address along with that video to help elevate your ranking on the Google™, Yahoo! and other important search engines. One of the most common ways to insert video into your site or blog is to upload it to YouTube (giving you even more links back to your website) - not as daunting a task as it may sound - then embed the url link into your blog or site. YouTube has videos and great help links to guide you through this process.

2. It Gives Your Overall Internet Presence More Interactivity, Credibility and Traffic

Website surfers expect to see photos at the very least but, even more importantly, now expect to see and even share videos with others. This helps to create loyal fans and make videos "go viral" (watched by many).

Consider creating a "how-to" video on something useful for your customers or about your products and services rather than writing 500 words of text. Other common uses for video uploaded to company websites are testimonials given by your enthusiastic customers. Your video doesn't even have to be more than a slideshow presentation, as is demonstrated here in this video I created for the Empowered Networking Blog!:



3. It Can be Easily Embedded into Your Social Media Sites

Your friends and networking connections can view these videos on your Facebook and MySpace pages, YouTube channels and more. This gives you added visibility for your company or cause at no extra charge. It also gives you more useful links back to your own website or blog.

4. It Sets You Apart from Your Competitors

Many companies are still not up on the latest technology when it comes to web design and website usability. They are not aware of the lost opportunities from relying on old website technology and websites that are difficult to navigate. By including a well-designed, thought-out video, you are most likely providing something your competitors are not. If you can make that video "sell" for you, it's well worth the time and effort you put into it.

5. It Allows You to Reach a Completely Different Target Market

You may be tapping into an entirely different audience than you ever imagined. There are people surfing the Internet who only want to watch videos. How they find your video will be determined by the keywords that you use when uploading the video.

As more mobile phones and other devices become equipped with the ability to display videos, the size of your audience may be growing exponentially.

Watch for my next post on ideas for creating and marketing videos to post on your website and/or blog.

Google Alerts: Who is Talking About You Online?

Google Name Alerts

by Felice Gerwitz

What are People Saying?

You have been online for some time, and now you wonder how you are doing. Is anyone talking about you? Are your products interesting? Does anyone care about your blog, twitter or facebook posts?

Other than asking your friends, your blog readers, or posting a query on your social media pages, it would be difficult to really know. After all, how do you tactfully ask... "Is anyone paying attention to all this great information I'm giving you?"

Going Deep Undercover with a little help from Google:

Google to the rescue. You can set up a range of queries to check the internet to see what people are saying about you and recieve the informaiton via your email address. It is very simple. Go to the following url:  http://www.google.com/alerts Here you can set up the information you want queried. Make sure if you have a common name to include a middle initial or name.

Here is what you will be asked:

Search Terms:
Type:
How Often:
Email Length
Deliver To:

You would type in the search term you would like to find. As for type you can search blogs, news, web, video or groups. I have mine set to "comprehensive" which means all of those items will be searched. As for how often, I set mine to once a week. Options are once a day, or as it happens. For email length you can select up to 20 results or 50 results. For delivery you can use your email address.

Search Terms

You can search as many terms as you would like. If you sell a particular product you can query the name of the product. You can use this to go to a blog post and answer or comment. This allows you the added exposure of posting to blogs where you have good information to offer. Remember you can fine tune your search results to blogs or specific areas such as news. In the meantime when you see your name mentioned when appropriate post a comment. You don't want it to appear that you are spying on the person mentioning your name, but you can use it to your advantage.

Random Views without Purpose

You can get carried away with this, and all online pursuits if you do not have a purpose or focus. Remember to keep your marketing plan in mind. Use this service in the way it is designed, to obtain information that will help you to give great customer support, and fill a need, or learn what your customers really think.

Have you used this service effectively? If so, share your results or tips with us.