Online video publishing has indeed taken the Internet by storm in recent years, making the use of video for marketing, promotion, news and PR online a true key strategic component and a key business differentiator for internet marketers who want to communicate effectively about their product profile and benefits within the shortest possible of time.
Internet is full of information and the average attention span of a web user today is measured in seconds. When web users search for their information at a search engine, they will get thousands of search results; when they visit your website, they may only spend a few seconds and little efforts to scan through what you are selling or proposing and decide whether your content, style, look and approach are a good fit for what they were actually looking for. These first few seconds are crucial and if you can delivery clear and targeted message by offering a fast, highly visual way to get their further attention and engage their interest, you have done bingo.
Does this mean that you just need to simply put up 10-min video tutorial on your website or just slamming some video contents up on your web pages, you will instantly sell more products or services? If this is your way of marketing with video on the web and hoping to get high conversion rate of traffic-to-sales, you will more toward getting disappointments than good news.
In order to make your video to effectively market your products/services online and convey your product/service key traits and characteristics within a very short amount of time in a unique, memorable way. These are a few rules of thumb to follow:
1. Get Your Video Seen
If you want your video to be your effective marketing tool, it must be able to see by as many web users as possible. Hence, don't just keep and tight your video inside your web site borders. Let your video content be free and distributed to the majors video sharing websites such as YouTube and Google video so that not only others can watch and talk about it, but they can easily download it, redistribute it, if not even publish it directly on their own sites.
2. Small File & Load Fast
Statistics show that average web users spend their time waiting for a page to load is about 7 seconds. Web pages that take longer than 7 seconds to load, their visitors normally are on the verge of clicking away and visit other website. Hence, you need to make sure your video file is small enough, ideally less than 1 megabyte and load almost in real time to keep the interest your visitors. AVI is the most common video format, the file size can easily exist 10 megabytes for a short 2-3 minutes video; hence if you share your video in this format, you most probably will get "click away" from you visitors because of long loading time of your video file. Hence, you must get a video format conversion tool to convert your video to a more internet friendly format such as SWF format.
3. Let Them Know It's A Video, A Short Video
If the web users do not know that it is a video, they won't click it and play it; hence your video will get watch. So, you must let the web users know that the "box" is a video; the best way is to make it look like a video / VCR-like by having a play and stop button where the web users can click to play the video and stop it whenever they want to stop it.
Let the web users know also this is a short video. No one wants to sit through a 30 minute presentation on the history of your company; be focused on your products/services and deliver your messages preferable within 2 minutes.
In Summary
Effectively market with video on the web is not just slamming some video content up on your web pages, it more toward effective video communication through video publishing & sharing on the web.
How to Put Video on your Website: Video File Types
If you want to put video on your website you must have a good knowledge of the basic video file types. What video file type to use? what are the pros and cons of each file type? These are just some of the questions you should ask yourself before proceeding with video implementation on your webpages.
There are three basic video file types on the internet. Mpeg, AVI and Quicktime. I believe the Quicktime file type is the most popular since a lot of huge entertainment and news sites use it exclusively on their web pages.
AVI is the oldest of the three main file types. It is a windows oriented video format but it's not the most popular because of the sound and video compatibility and synchronizing problems. Because the Quicktime format can be used on either a windows or a macintosh computer, the AVI video file type loses it's popularity every day.
The mpeg format is a popular video file type that uses it's high output quality to increase it's popularity over the Quicktime format. Mpeg is used on video games, cd-roms and other media that require high output quality. One disadvantage of mpeg is that it sacrifices file size to gain in digital quality. The mpeg video files are usually large.
Another disadvantage of the mpeg format is that you really need time and sophisticated hardware and software to convert plain video into mpeg. And let's not forget that the mpeg format is not supported by apple and macintosh meaning that if you put mpeg video on your website, those users with macintosh will not be able to see it.
Quicktime is by far the most popular video file type developed by apple for macintosh users, but is also compatible with the IBM-compatible machines and the windows operating systems. The hardware and software you need to digitize video into the Quicktime format is very inexpensive, compared to the mpeg format. So its much easier and cheaper to create video and put it on your website using the Quicktime format.
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