Video MarketingVideo marketing is one of the best ways to gain higher search rankings quickly, get more traffic and creatively promote products. But how does it work? Here's a handy guide to the process.
The Steps
1. Create a video using your video camera or putting together "stills".
2. Produce the video in an appropriate format - most video sites accept .WMV - the windows movie maker format. Check out Camtasia Studio by TechSmith. This is an easy to use program with some of the best video making tutorials around. A fully functional 30 day trial is available here.
You can also use the free Movie Maker that is a part of Windows, or if you are a Mac user the ILife software also has a free built in movie editor/producer. You can also use the Final Cut software series from Apple for more advanced video editing and production.3. Register at video sharing sites
4. Upload your video to the video sharing sites. Don't just go to YouTube! Upload to as many sites as possible for overnight search engine love. Check out TrafficMom - a video submission service that makes this chore incredibly fast and easy. They have a list of 30 good video submission sites that have high rankings and high traffic. The site list is frequently updated and TrafficMom is geared towards internet product marketing and doesn't include sites that won't help your rankings.General
There are many video sites available for your video creations. While this is a good thing - your videos stand a better chance of being found by being on more sites - each video site has it's own rules regarding file sizes, media types, title and description lengths and keywords.Some video sites will "recompress" your video to make the file size even smaller and quicker loading. If you view your video creation on a site and notice the quality is not as good as the original you uploaded, that site's compression program is to blame. YouTube is well known for this degradation of quality. See the YouTube section of this guide for some tips on avoiding quality issues.
Follow the guidelines below to reduce the risk of having your videos rejected.
File Size
With very few exceptions most video sites accept any video under 100Mb in size. Some also place time limits on the videos - notably YouTube with a time limit of 10 minutes.Remember that the file size will depend on your media type. An Apple Quicktime movie in the .mov format will be MUCH bigger than a Windows Movie Maker file in the WMV format. A full motion video will be much larger than a "slideshow" or a Power Point movie.
Media
There are several popular formats that most video sites will accept. These are:
- AVI - raw video often the format saved by a video camera. HUGE file size but excellent quality
- MPEG, MP4, MPG - a nice compression format, reasonable file size and quality
- WMV - The Windows Media format, sometimes creates a problem where sound and motion aren't in sync. Videos produced in WMV are usually good quality and small file size. Watch your sound volume - recompression by the video site may make the volume too low to be heard easily
- MOV - One of the Apple QuickTime video formats producing good quality large file size videos. Use this format for slideshow or Power Point videos that use text, especially if posting to YouTube. Don't use this format for full motion video as the file size will quickly go over the 100 Mb limit.
- SWF - Flash output which creates high quality, small file size cross browser compatible videos. Most video sites do not accept SWF which is unfortunate. Unlike other video formats, you can embed a clickable url in an SWF movie and an SWF file can not be directly edited, making it next to impossible for a video site to run advertising on your video.
- FLV - is the "source" file for a Flash movie. A few sites do accept this file type, which can be directly edited. It produces a high quality video with a somewhat large file size.
- DV, DIVD, etc - this is often the raw output from your cell phone camera or video camera. Good quality and reasonable file size, but not as widely accepted as WMV or MPG.
Suggestions: Look through each of the sites you will be submitting to for accepted file types. (Check out the site profiles in the registration section of TrafficMom for this info.) With luck you will find that you only need to produce your finished video in one file format that is accepted by all the video sites you are using.
If you use a video editing program such as Camtasia, you can easily produce the same video in different file formats. If you are hand submitting, keep a list of each submission site and the accepted file types for each one. Submit the appropriate file type to each site.Titles, Descriptions, Keywords
Not all video sites allow for Titles, Descriptions or Keywords (tags). Those that do have character limits for TItles and Descriptions. A good rule of thumb is to limit your Title to 25 or 30 characters, counting spaces as a character. Descriptions should be limited to no more than 250 characters. Some sites will allow a url in the description, others will not.
Keywords are also called tags by the video sites. Not all sites will use tags. Those that do may want the tags separated by commas, others want only a space.
Registration
You must register with each site before being allowed to post your videos. Many sites send a registration email confirmation that requires you to visit the site after registration and verify your email address. If you don't complete this step, your videos will be rejected.Additional Tips
Hand submitting to video registration sites is a chore. A free piece of software, TypeItIn from Waveget takes much of the repetitive work out of submission. Use this handy tool to store your user name, password, and email for one button form fill-in. Set up another key for the title, a second for the description and a third for your key tags. You can also store your file name, a second version of your keytags or anything else you need for upload forms. This is a great timesaver - hitting one button versus typing a paragraph saves time and errors on repetitive tasks.If you are hand submitting, set up a simple spreadsheet. Include the login url, the submission url, the accepted file format, and any size or running time constraints for each site. This will help you avoid errors in the submission process and keeps everything neatly arranged. If you don't already have a spreadsheet program, you can pick up a free office suite from OpenOffice.org that includes a spreadsheet module.