Video marketing is one of the newest and hottest areas of social media for gaining traffic to your blog. The ease of producing and delivering short videos has never been better. Also, there are more places to distribute video than just YouTube. Let’s look at how to use video to gain traffic to your blog.
What Has Made Video So Popular
Three major changes have occurred that make video more popular than ever. First is bandwidth; the advent of widely available broadband internet access has made it possible for more people to consume video easily. This change extends to mobile platforms and devices that have made video to smart phones a common experience over cell networks or tethered to local area networks. Next, there are a number of good video sites that aggregate content by topic and make cross-promotion of videos a natural experience. If you make a video on a topic, people viewing other related videos are likely to discover you.
Imagine how hard it would be to generate traffic to see just your content; but when you submit to a directory or aggregator of content such as YouTube, you are in front of millions of potential viewers. Finally, production capability of individuals to make good, short videos has improved through use of free tools and lower cost, web-friendly video recorders. Flip cameras and iPhones make it easier than ever to record and post video.
More Than Just YouTube
There are more video sites out there than just YouTube. YouTube is big, but also check out TubeMogul.com. It distributes video to a number of sites. Also, get familiar with Google Video. Google Video does not replicate the free hosting offered by YouTube, but it is a place where you can see how your videos appear in searches on Google. Also, if your blog is related to a specific topic area, search the Internet to see if there are video directories in that niche. Search Google for “your niche topic + videos.”
Easier Than You Think
Making videos has never been easier. You can get a USB headset with a mic for very little cost at an office supply store or online. For recording your screen, you can use the free version of Jing and produce videos of up to five minutes in length. The iPhone 4 comes with a free HD video recording capability. Flip cameras offer a low cost solution for recording video off-screen.
Getting Traffic
Each video you make is a piece of content. That content carries with it meta-data and descriptive content that heavily influences the “find-ability” of your content. Here are some tips for getting the most traffic out of each video.
- Pick popular topics. People are not looking for everything at equal levels fo volume. Think about your ideas for videos as falling somewhere on a scale of popularity, and craft your content to appeal to people searching for the most popular topics.
- Jump to the head of the line. Other people have already found out what keywords, tags, titles, and descriptions are effective for being at the top of the search results for a topic. So use what they have already discovered. You can edit slightly the items such as title and description, but for tags, feel free to copy and paste.
- Make lots of short, helpful videos. By making more clips, you put more hooks out. By making them short, you leave the viewer unsatisfied so that they click on your link and visit your site.
- Include your URL at the very beginning of your description and be sure to include “http://www” at the beginning. Doing so on YouTube will hyperlink your URL.
- Use annotations in your video. On YouTube, you can add annotations to encourage people to visit your site.
- Make your titles interesting. What would you click on to view? Think about magazine covers to get your creative juices going. If you can write a good headline, your video will get views.
- Tell people to visit your site. Start and end your video by sharing the benefits of going to your site. By telling them what to do, you will increase that action.
Finally, choose action over perfection. Taking action to get out there with your first video is the best next step. Don’t wait for everything to be perfect, just get going. You will get better at all the best practices over time. By taking action to get all the way through your first one and let it start producing traffic to your website, you will create a positive feedback loop for yourself that will naturally energize you to do more.