We’ve talked before about how valuable videos can be for your site and even how to optimize them well. But we haven’t talked about autorun videos and I think this is a good time to mention that I wouldn’t recommend autorun videos. There are three primary reasons why I’d stay away from videos that load automatically when a visitor lands on your site.

1. Poor SEO
2. Slows your load time
3. They annoy visitors

Let’s examine these three reasons briefly.

Videos are difficult to SEO because the search engines don’t crawl. Only recently has Google announced that it can crawl text in videos, but that ability is still quite limited. The best video optimization involves the use of surrounding text on the page and if you have an autorun vidoe then you likely aren’t going to have much of that. But supposing you do, the other two reasons should be enough to convince you.

Page load time is very important for search engine trust and rankings. The slower your page loads the more the search engines themselves will cast a crooked at you. Visitors too will not stick around for long if your pages load too slowly. So there’s a double whammy.

Speaking of annoying your visitors, you stand a good chance of losing a lot of traffic if you force your visitors to view content they don’t want to see. Your video may be the best video in the world, but if you force it on your visitors then they will resent it and many of them won’t return. In general, if you annoy site visitors you lose them forever. Don’t use autorun videos because people just don’t like them.

Who can afford to go to a conference or workshop these days? And who has to?
Teaching an online workshop or webinar is a great way to offer your small business services in a comfortable, affordable format your clients will appreciate.

Seminars, webinars, and online workshops run the gambit from streaming videos, podcasts, PowerPoint presentations, and interactive forums. There’s software that can do anything you want, as complicated or as minimal as you desire. Universities and many teaching or service based companies have jumped on this bandwagon and now offer distance learning degrees and certificates. Students and participants can view classes from a remote location, interact with other students on message boards, watch a streaming video, upload their own videos and papers, and even take tests–all from the comfort of their home in their pj’s.

The benefits for online webinars and workshops are:

It’s a promotional tool.
You can partner with other sites and be promoted there for days and weeks prior to the event.
You can promote your webinar/workshop on forums and discussion groups–which also promotes your website in an acceptable way.
It deserves a e-release/press release, which also promotes your site and business in a reputable manner.
Others will advertise for you. Don’t forget to contact online calendar sites. You might be able to spin your helpful seminar (even consider offering it at little or no charge) so that it’s considered a community service–which means even more sites will promote it for you (as well a contacting TV or radio).
You can send out e-queries to other sites because you have a reason to–your webinar.
You get to expand your database of contacts.

All seminars have you register, which means that you can ask for pertinent information such as email address, mailing address and other information.
Webinars and online workshops don’t need to be live. In fact, if they’re text based, you can collect questions and then respond over the next 12-24 hours, which is a smart way to avoid live chat or streaming broadcast problems. Text based seminars also allow you to hold the copyright, which means you can take the information you’ve gathered and use it in future e-books, brochures, newsletters or website content.

With an investment in software and a little brainstorming, you can take your own conference and workshop notes and turn them into a dynamic webinar or online workshop that engages your current clients and reaches out to your potential target audience. And in today’s climate, online webinars and workshops allow you to offer your services to the online world.

Web-based videos used to be the domain of large corporations, and they used major resources to create every kind of video—from edu-tain to entertain visuals that are placed on YouTube and other major websites. It’s no wonder that small businesses jumped in and said, “Hey, what about us?”
And no wonder, web-based videos boasted a $2 billion dollar industry in 2007 and are expected to top 10 billion by the end of 2012.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that only 20-somethings watch online videos—a healthy 40% of viewers are over the age of 25 and half are female. Web-based videos are promoted on websites, e-newsletters, on SMS devices and when they’re fun, catchy, or slick—word gets out and they’re quickly shared.

How Can Small Businesses Create a Web-Based Video?

1. All you need is a digital camera, a computer, and a bit of ingenuity.
2. What do you want your audience to know? Start with who you are. Video your office, employees, and customers—especially the satisfied ones. Promote a store opening, a product announcement, or a contest winner. Anything you can blog about, you can video.
4. Go to YouTube and type in some of your keywords and see what pops up. Check to view your competitors videos or other companies you have something in common with—then make yours better. Study what they did right and build on it.
3. Hire it out—consider a college kid. Every university has a communications department, and they need the practice and oftentimes, have their own equipment and already know how to upload it online. How easy is that? Make a call, hire a couple of college kids, tell them your plan and style, and see what happens. You might even be able to barter their services (what do you have to offer?) or many internships are for the experience.
4. Don’t just do one video—create a series. Make it fun, spoof a TV show, feature a local celebrity. Get creative. Every town has a memorable local commercial. It may involve a clown nose or a silly jingle, but the point is, they’re remembered. You don’t have to go bizarre to create a recognizable brand and style–but you just may want to–there’s a cheese-ball in most of us.
5. Keep your video short—ten minutes max.
6. Always strive to help or educate. Yes, promote your company and product, but don’t stand there for five minutes stating your name over and over—be of benefit.
7. Is your video funny? Does it flow? Does it cover your demographics?
8. Pick your spokesperson well. Even if it’s not you, or they don’t work for you—choose someone who is approachable, speaks well and uses appropriate body language.
9. Consider using music, but make sure you’re not breaking copyright laws. You can always use classical music, or feature a local band—and you’ll get their following to help you spread your message. You can even create your own music with programs such as Garage Band.
10. After your video is made, you can edit it. Check out iMovie for Mac, or Windows Movie Maker for PCs.

These tips are just to get you started. Local and online videos are a great way to feature your small business and broaden your audience base—and by posting videos on your website, blog, and social media, you’ll be able to capture and showcase your business in this exciting, visual format.

Video conferencing, also known as web conferencing has been around for awhile, but with the latest technology it’s now available and affordable for small busineses.

Video conferencing can save time and money—and who doesn’t need that in today’s economic climate?

The benefits of video conferencing are:
• It’s great to use between two people (point to point) —or multiple groups (multi point) in various parts of the country.
• Video or web conferencing can incorporate other computer/visual materials such as shared documents, white boards, and training materials and other audio and visual materials that will enhance your presentations.
• Many video or web conferencing services only require downloading software and a webcam. Even if your recipient doesn’t have a webcam, they can participate in voice mode only.
• Most new notebook computers have built in webcams–so that’ not an added expense.
• Why fly to a location for meeting when video conferencing is a much smarter alternative amd saves on travel expenses?
• A video or web conference is much more interactive than a phone call—and encourages participation–those who participate can’t easily surf the web, eat lunch, and not pay attention while on camera.
• You can reach a wider audience, chat with potential clients, brain storm with partners, and even teach a webinar with the use of video or web conferencing.
• Humans are complicated. Emails can be misunderstood and hours of conference calls are boring and ineffective. By utilizing the visual image, you are able to utilize visual, audible, and gestural clues needed to make solid assessments.

Video conferencing has many applications. Get creative. Involve your employees, welcome new and potential clients by showing them you have the technological tools to compete. What better way to announce a new product line, share a marketing video, or get feedback at a pivotal time than by using this simple and affordable technlogy?

There are many companies offering video conferencing services such as Skype VoIP, Gmail (Voice and Video Chat), Webex, ooVoo, and Live- Conferencing.com, to name a few.

Be sure to check your options before committing to a video or web conferencing service. Quality, types of services and prices range greatly, so take care in choosing what’s best for your small business.

Making the video to promote your website is the easy part of video marketing. Once you have the video or videos, what should you do to make sure they get the best distribution? There are literally tens of thousands of videos on websites like YouTube, so what are the chances of someone finding yours?

Getting links to your video is always a good idea, this will help it appear higher in the search engines. You can do this by linking to it from your website or blog and via article marketing. If you`ve made some good videos that are viral, then other people will start to link to them as well.

Using a good title for your video will help people find it when doing searches. Be sure to add tags that include your keywords, whenever you are given the opportunity. This is an area that is very important since it helps not only people, but search engines find your videos.

Video marketing draws a lot of attention, often far more than text marketing, but it doesn`t mean that you can just upload a video and sit back. Be proactive!

YouTube is just one of dozens of video sharing sites that are available, but it`s also the most popular. In fact, this company recently announced that they are the second largest search engine! That`s big, and it means that when you are planning your video marketing strategy, it`s a good idea to go with YouTube.

Video marketing has already proven to be extremely popular with the newer generations. Most people are now quite comfortable on the computer and enjoy looking at videos. YouTube is one of the first places that people look when they want to watch videos.

By using video marketing in a popular venue like this, you`ll find that it`s an effective medium for drawing attention to your business. It`s important to put your business URL with a call to action in the actual video, since it`s quite possible that the video will be shown somewhere besides YouTube. When someone shows it on their blog, the viewers won`t be able to read the description or click through to your business site.

Consider using YouTube for your video marketing, as it`s a major player in the world of online vids.

Did you know that 65% of media sites use video these days? And more than 50% of them use outside video sources . . . which means this could be a great video marketing opportunity for small businesses.

Media sites are always on the lookout for new and interesting content and the fact is that video holds people`s attention and keeps them interested for longer than a written article, so it`s only natural that these websites would want to bring in as much outside video as possible.

As a small business owner, you can enjoy the benefit of having your viral videos featured on a major media website, if you plan it right. You`ll need video marketing that really is top of the line and worth placing in front of viewers. Preferably, your videos will be newsworthy, without being a hard sell, since they aren`t going to publish a blatant ad. This could be a great way to get your name in front of a wider audience!

Video marketing is definitely a growing method of gaining publicity, so it`s worth working on and going for those bigger media sites.

Did you know that more people now watch video online than they read? It`s so easy to watch a video and after decades of watching television and movies, your clients are already accustomed to gleaning their information from video, so why not use video marketing as a method of reaching them?

Getting Started

As long as you have a camera that you can upload video with to the computer, you`re good to go. Most PCs now come with built in video editing software, which you can use. All you really need is a title for your video and the ability to cut and splice if you need to.

Videos can be uploaded onto YouTube, Metacafe or any number of hosting sites if you don`t want the hassle of hosting on your own website. All of these offer a simple code that can be cut and pasted onto your webpage to make the video visible to visitors.

Video marketing adds a whole other dimension to your business. It will let people see you as a real person and can be an excellent way to reach out to your target market.

There’s an interesting article today in SiteProNews about video search engine optimization. While Randy Zlobec makes some great points, I was a bit disappointed that he left out the most important part of video optimization, especially if you host your videos on your own site. He does cover some very important territory, however:

• Meta tags
• Submitting to more than just Google and YouTube
• Embedding on your own site
• Stay away from pop-up players
• Use a video search tool on your site
• Use some kind of analytics to determine which videos are most popular and how long visitors stay on your videos page
• Ensure your videos are high enough quality for TV
• Don’t use ActiveX controls
• Create a sitemap for your videos

All of these are important for video optimization and I wouldn’t leave any of them out, but Zlobec did leave out one very important item that should be the first thing you think of, namely, text content on your videos page that is descriptive and contains your important keywords. Aside from visitor usability, this is the most important thing.

While Google has announced that it can now crawl Flash files, there still is no evidence that all videos will be crawled. Even then, when Google crawls Flash it is only looking for text and links, two elements that are likely not to be the most prominent in those files. And other search engines won’t even do that, which means that your videos will have to be optimized using elements not within the video itself. Content on the page has always been the most important aspect of search engine optimization - and it still is. Optimize your videos will valuable text content that uses your most important keywords - that is, the most important keywords for that video.

Mixpo, a video advertising firm for small to mid-size videos, has arrived. That means video marketing is on the rise. Check out these stats from Greg Sterling:

Are you currently doing any video advertising?

* Yes: 19.1% (if one segments for “0-4 employees” the number goes down to 11.8%)
* No: 80.9%

Who created your video?

* Friend or relative: 21.9% (if one segments for “0-4 employees” the number goes up to just over 40%)
* Professional service (e.g., TurnHere, Comcast, yellow pages, Spot Runner, local videographer): 57.4%
* Online tools (Spotmixer, Jivox, Mixpo): 9.4%
* Other: 11.4%

It appears that more than half of small- to mid-size businesses that are using online video advertising, more than half are using an outside agency to create their videos. This is smart marketing. I’ve always believed in letting the experts do the hard work.

A look at Mixpo’s partners reveals a telling story:

• ActiveRain
• Realogics
• MCM Group

If you’re in real estate then you probably recognize those names. But online video advertising isn’t just for real estate professionals. You can use this method to communicate with potential customers no matter what kind of business you are in. I think we’ll see an increase in video advertising in the near future.

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