How to get your share of the Video Traffic Boom
In the time it takes you to read this article, over 100 million internet users will have watched some kind of online video, that’s over 100 million page views and video views, mostly highly targeted, so you can imagine the traffic the video boom is driving.
Video generates traffic. Video sells. Video has become a mainstream in any kind of online marketing. More and more surfers expect to see videos in any page they view on the internet, and when they don’t see video, they tend to vote with their mouse and navigate away from the page. We have to have marketing videos on our own websites.
Multimedia traffic has become increasingly important in the Web 2.0 environment that we, as internet marketers, find ourselves competing for.
Video marketing is hugely effective at generating traffic, much more so than the traditional PPC methods, where rising click costs mean most campaigns need double digit CTR’s to stand any chance of being profitable.
I’m not knocking PCC here. It’ still a valid method to drive traffic to a site and one which I continue to see success with. The trend is however towards video, so we either go along or we get left behind.
Making a marketing video isn’t an overly complex undertaking. The software applications required are mostly simple and reasonably priced, so much so, that a full suite of programs needn’t cost more than a few hundred dollars.
What can be complicated and leave us open to costly errors is the way we go about marketing our videos. One way is to produce a marketing video for our product or the affiliate product we promote and simply submit this to the various video hosting sites such as Revver, YouTube or Metaface to name just a few.
After submission, the video hosting sites allow us to further embed these videos in our own websites, without the need for any additional conversion. This process is simple and straightforward, but not one the serious online marketer should follow.
The reason I say this is that the embed codes from the video sites, such as Revver for example, also include embedded videos from other users.
Video hosting sites group the videos submitted to them into categories. Taking an embed code from a video site could well result in additional videos being carried across from a competitor site for example. We would then be offering free traffic and advertising to this competitor, which is not really something we should be doing.
The most effective way is to add our videos to our own websites, using direct conversion to a flash format and adding this flash video to our site. This is where the need for an efficient video converter comes in.
Videos generally include large volumes of information and tend to be large files. YouTube has a 10 minute and 100 MB maximum for any video submitted to the site, so this gives a good indication of the kind of file sizes I’m talking about.
Converting a video to flash does require time and computer resources. If we are working on a single computer system, the our hands are tied while the conversion takes place.
One of the most valuable commodities we have as internet marketers is our time. By the same token, Video is now one of the most effective weapons we have in our online arsenal. Combine video with effective use of time and we have a winner.
I see dozens of people buying into cutting edge production software whilst ignoring the conversion software. The result? Super looking marketing videos that nobody ever sees and never result in any sales.
The top class converters I use cost less than $100. Low quality converters come in at around $70. Does that price difference merit time and frustration? Not for me and neither should it for you.
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