Monthly Archives: September 2011

Converting video with a Free tool

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If you have ever tried to use free tools to make videos using things like Camstudio, Windows Movie Maker and many others you will sometimes encounter some issues. Windows has a good movie recorder in Windows Movie Maker and Windows Live Movie Maker. They record fine and can be edited fine. However, the format they produce when you have finished is normally an “avi” format. This format gives a good quality playback but is very large in size. This means you will have problems uploading to a website and getting it to play. In this format you will have to let someone download it to their computer to play.
To get a video to play on a website it has to be in format that works with a player such as JV player or flowplayer. These products are designed to take your video and play it in the website much as you would with a YouTube video. The can be fine tuned to show different features such as a playback bar and different colored backgrounds. You can also add your own pictures a the starting pint of the video which show when it is not playing. They work on WordPress blogs and on normal html/php web sites. The current main formats the videos need to be in are “flv” , “mp4” and “swf” . “Html 5” is also coming into play which will change this. Swf is also known as shockwave and when generated with the right tool can play on its own and be uploaded to a website as an all-inclusive package. The other formats can be uploaded as single files to work with Flowplayer or JV player.
For getting the videos into the right format you will need to use a file converter. Some tools include some basic conversions. The popular VLC product that plays back videos has the capability to convert files. It is a little more complex to do than just point and click but will work.
Another tool is Format Factory. For conversion this tool is very easy to use. You select what format you want the output to be in, select the file you want to convert, then press start. You can make more complex fine tuning with this tool such as the quality of the output , the size of the screen, sound quality, etc. The tool also has the capability to split or join files together.
There are many other similar tools that can be found using the search engines and these are all free to use. If you want to use a paid version Camtasia has the capability of outputting the files in a web friendly format but you will need to pay around $300 for it.

Getting ranked Number 1 in the Video searches

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If you are concentrating your efforts on marketing with video, one major part of the strategy is ‘ranking’ the video high in the search engine results. If videos show up in the search results, they are more likely to get clicked than the listings that are just plain text.

Below we’ll discuss the methods that will ensure your videos will get top search rankings.

Tip one is to submit your video to as many sharing sites as you can.. Most people only submit to youtube. gain the advantage by multiplying your video onto different sites. This of course can be done manually, or simply use a video submission service like video upload pro, senuke or tubemogul.

The idea is that the more sites your video appears on, the more likely it is that one of them will appear in the search results.

Videos need to be optimized in order to appear in the search results for certain search terms. The best way to do it is to optimize for the same keyword on every site you submitted to. Or, optimize each video submission for a different keyword phrase (even though it is the same video). if any of them get good rankings, then you know which keyword phrase it is best to optimize for.

These are the things you need to concentrate on to optimize for specific keyword phrases:

– The video title
– The content of the description
— The video file name

Currently, search engines do not rank videos determined by the actual video content (although this is something they are working on). it is all down to the description, tags and title name. Think of the video the same way as optimizing an article. the keyword phrase should be included in the title, and the descripion, in a conversational way.

The filename itself is not usually displayed (unless you forget to fill out the title details). however, the filename is shown in the source html, so it could certainly impact the search engines.

The best phrases to try to rank your videos for are those that have less than 50k competition. for best results, the competing pages should be under 20,000,.

After finding the best keyword phrases, submitting and optimizing your video, the next thing you need to do to ensure a good search engine ranking is to build backlinks to the video page. You do not have much control over the page your video appears on in the video sharing site, so once you’ve optimized as much as you can, backlinks become the next most important piece in the puzzle.

The backlinks are the same types you would use for any site you wanted to gain rankings for:

— Article submission (links in the resource box)
— Social sites and bookmarking
— Commercial linking networks (paid links)
— Blog commenting

Another trick that most video marketers don’t know about is that embedding a video in different sites that are optimized for similar keywords will also increase the ranking in the search engines, as well as gaining more views to the video.

The extra views and added comments will boost the video in the video sites own results. This can be an amazing thing in itself. the latest statistics for youtube indicate that over 2 billion searches are being made each day.

The more activity there is on your video, the higher it will rank in the search results.

90% of ‘video marketers’ neglect this. they just make a video, submit it to youtube, and hope for the best. Submit to multiple sites, optimize your video page, and build some backlinks. doing this will put you way ahead of everyone else.

How to Increase Your Video’s Views.

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Driving traffic to your videos is as simple as driving the traffic to other pages. The methods listed here may only apply to video, but chances are that they are not methods that are new to you. One thing that should ease your mind is that search engines have yet to be developed that can index the content of videos. The end result of this is that there are fewer things that need to be done to increase search engine rankings, but all should be optimized as much as possible. To ensure the fastest “organic” search traffic you will want to focus on keywords that generate the highest search volume while coming up with the lowest amount of competing videos in the search engines. Make certain that you have used your keyword phrase in the filename of the video as well as in the description and title when you are uploading your video to sites like YouTube.

Use these options wisely, as they are the only parts of the video page that you can influence. Ensure that you build backlinks to each video, using anchor-text that is keyword rich. By doing this you will ensure that your video not only gets traffic, but that it gets ranked by the search engines as well. In order to drive additional traffic it’s always helpful to use your own network when promoting video.

Sharing your video on Facebook or Twitter, or even in a blog or sending links by email are all good ways to ensure your video gets seen. In order to rank higher in a search engine’s results, you can increase your videos views and comments by sending your own traffic. The more views your video receives; the more comments that it generates; the higher your video will be ranked by the search engines. With this sort of encouragement your video will eventually receive enough views that the traffic can explode; a process known as “going viral”. Using “video responses” is another means by which you can market your video and increase site traffic. Many video sharing sites allow you to use a video as a reply to an already posted video. Because your response will displaying your video under an already posted (and popular) video, yours will gain exposure by being shown to those who are viewing the original video.

This process will be most effective if you post your video as a response to those videos that already receive a good deal of traffic. This process won’t work as well if you respond to videos that are not very popular. You can ensure that you receive a good amount of traffic to your own video if you post a response to a video that has a high viewing rate.

This shows that there is a lot more to generating traffic than simply posting a video. You may have to “nurse” your video by promoting it until it starts generating its own traffic.

Optimizing for your keyword phrase

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Once you have done the keyword research , checked out the competition, you’re ready to start creating videos optimized for each keyword phrase. Surely they are going to easily rank, in Google — right?

Unfortunately, not for sure. Expecting these kind of results will only lead to frustration. There needs to be one extra step in the keyword research phase. You need to KNOW that it’s possible to rank an optimized video for one particular keyword phrase, before you start putting in the effort of creating the video.

How to tell?

In order to tell if it’s going to be possible to rank your video for a particular phrase, you need to check manually. Copy and paste one of your researched keyword phrases into Google. Any video listings in the search results? If there aren’t, you should forget trying to rank a video for that phrase, it may never happen.

For example. At the time of writing this article, there were no videos for the phrase: “tea tree oil uses”. Even though there were hundreds of videos listed in Google (check by using the “Videos” tab), Google chose not to rank any of them in the first page of the search results.

Now, from this point, you could either dismiss this phrase and try another from your list, or “play around” with the phrase a little. Add or take away words to the keyword phrase to see if any videos appear.

Understanding why Google ranks some videos, but not others…

Try to understand things from Google’s viewpoint. They only want to display a video in the search results if it is going to be useful to the searcher. To continue the above example, after adding the word “directions” to the phrase, (so it would be: “tea tree oil uses directions”) videos appeared in the search results.

If the competition was a little easier, it would be a good idea to go ahead and make a video, and optimize it for that phrase.

Optimizing for your keyword phrase

Continuing this, sometimes the videos themselves give a hint on other keyword phrases that could possibly be ranked for.

After typing in “tea tree oil uses directions”, videos appeared at the bottom of the page in Google. The title of the videos that appeared was “Soap Making Instructions – Tea Tree Oil Soap”, so they were not much related to the phrase I typed in.

Going a step further, I pasted in “tea tree oil soap instructions”. Much better – videos were ranking at position number 2 instead of the bottom of the page. This would be the best keyword phrase to now optimize the video for.

If you are concentrating on gaining search engine traffic from video marketing, using the above technique will be a very useful factor in determining whether it would be worthwhile in creating a video.

It may add an extra step to your keyword research, but the initial efforts will pay off in the long run, and avoid frustration..

Three Great Ways to Dominate the Search Engines For Your Chosen Keyword Phrase

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If you want to increase traffic to your video, you’ll need to try and get your video to the top of the search engines. Although, you don’t need your video in the top position to ensure that it stands out from the pack and gets high clickthrough rates. If you want your video to dominate the search results, there are three things you need to do.

1. Make Sure You Have the Right Keywords

To begin with, targeting the right keywords will ensure success. Choose unique keyword phrases that have a healthy search volume, but not too much competition. A good thing to look for is that there are already videos ranked for the chosen keyword phrase, as sometimes, big search engines like Google do not include videos in the search results, no matter how well optimized the videos are. Having this information will ensure that you will know how much work needs doing to ensure your video out ranks the competition. Videos that come up in your keyword search results will need to be analyzed to determine just what you will be competing against.

– Analyze the title and description of the video to see what keywords it uses.

– How many views and comments the video has received?

– Use a backlink analysis to determine the number of backlinks the video has, from which sites, and the page rank of the sites.

If you use tools like Backlink Watch or SEO Quake plugin for Firefox you can make tracking backlinks a simple exercise. Don’t be discouraged if you find the videos you analyze prove to be difficult to compete with, just try the next keyword on your list.

2. A Note on Backlinking

In order to make certain that your videos rise to the top of the search engines, you’ll need to make sure that you have backlinks pointing to your video; preferably with keyword-dense anchor text.

Don’t hesitate to use your article marketing skills, social bookmarking techniques, blog comments and networks as well as any backlink services you can think of to get those backlinks.

A good thing about building backlinks to videos is the fact that you don’t need to space them out too much. You can add as many links as you want very quickly. Search engines won’t notice full scale link building efforts, considering the massive amount of backlinks already pointing to the site. Following  this advice will enable you to use the type of submission services like Unique Article Wizard, that create large amounts of links in a very brief time period.

3. Syndication and RSS Submission Explained

Nearly every video sharing site generates automatic RSS feeds for each user or video page. You can submit the video feeds generated by using software along the lines of RSS Submit or RSSBot, or you can manually submit them. Two things are working in your favor if you do this.

Firstly, by doing this, each aggregator will generate links that will point back to your video and increase your backlink numbers. The second advantage is that your feed could very possibly be picked up by site creators that use targeted feeds to generate their content. More backlinks to your videos will be generated by doing this.

You can bring your video to the top of the search results by using your keyword phrases; a task that may take some time and effort, but is really quite simple. Your extra efforts will be rewarded when you see how much traffic is generated because of it.

5 Ways to Create Traffic with Viral Videos

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Video marketing can be a  blessing and curse. Most internet marketers know how the process works but reach difficulties when it comes to creating the video.

However, there are ways to make it easier to create a good video. Generating decent videos is fairly simple if you use some easy-to-remember methods. These five simple strategies will ensure that you not only create a video that will increase your traffic, but which will go viral while you watch your revenues soar.

Tip #1 – Select The Best Video Subject

Think carefully when considering what your video is going to be about. Getting your video to go viral can be as simple as choosing a particularly controversial topic. You don’t have to make something up to do this. By using the video to make a statement; regardless of your personal take on the issue; you will generate traffic from those who fall on both sides of the issue. Strong feelings for or against your topic can encourage those who support it or who hate it to not only respond to your video but to share it with others.

Tip #2 – How to Create Your Video

Making a video that will generate traffic doesn’t take a performance arts degree. There are many ways to make a simple video; a screen capture video that demonstrates your product, shows your PowerPoint presentation or which gives a demonstration how to do something are all effective methods. It doesn’t have to cost a fortune to get started, use Camtasia (30 day trial) or a free program like Camstudio to get started. Either of these will give you what you need without worrying about the cost.

* Camstudio – http: //camstudio. org
* Camtasia – http: //www. techsmith. com/camtasia

The software is very easy to use. Simply press record, start to talk on your subject material, then view the result. Don’t make the video too long though. The shorter your video the more likely people will be to watch the entire thing.

Tip #3 – How to Post Your Video

YouTube is the “800 pound gorilla” of video sharing sites, so you definitely want to post your video there. Sites like Google Video, Vimeo, Metacafe, Revver and Stickam are video sharing sites that are also quite popular and which should be taken into consideration when you are thinking of uploading your video.

Tip #4 – Ways to promote Your Video

Spareading the word about your video comes next. Your video can be promoted to your own social sites like Facebook and Twitter, and promoted to your email list (if you own one).

Consider all the places you visit where people seem interested in what you have to say, you can include a link to your video on any of these places. Don’t be shy about asking people to do you a favor by subscribing to your channel or clicking on “like”. The more people you share your video with, the more people they will share it with, and soon your video will go viral. If you are lucky your video will reach more and more people every day. You’ll find your video reaching “critical mass” by using these steps.

Tip #5 – Don’t Give Up

You can’t expect that every video you post is going to be a success. The most effective method is to never give up. Continue to submit new videos. Keep the channels of communication open; people who have commented on your video are more likely to comment again if they get a response from you. Keep your old videos fresh in people’s minds by continually promoting them. The tipping point for sending your video viral can be reached by consistently following these methods that will increase your videos views and comments. By which means you will easily gain more traffic and will increase the amount of money that you make.

Here’s Three Video Optimization Tips

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Many marketers who begin video marketing for the first time, think that all they have to do is upload a bunch of videos, and the traffic will automatically come pouring in.

Even though the internet video is growing at an extremely rapid rate, it’s not always that easy to tap into. Many have stated that it’s actually the complete opposite. Millions of new videos are being uploaded on a daily basis, yours could soon get buried and forgotten.

However, that’s only if you do not know how to optimize your videos effectively. Below there are three vital things that need to be applied to your videos that will increase traffic and view counts.

1. Keyword Phrase Optimization

Keyword optimization is not something you usually think about when it comes to video marketing. That’s because the search engines are not able to scan the spoken words in the video (well, not yet anyway).

However, you need to put into perspective the way the video *pages* are setup.

Optimizing a video is much the same as optimizing an article or other web pages. you have the ability to alter the title, file name and description of the video submission.

Below are a couple of vital things that need to be optimized with each video submission. it’s important to include the keyword phrase in the following 3 places:

a) The title of the video
b) Video description. the keyword phrase itself should be included as the first words.
c) The file name of the video (the name the video is saved as before uploading)

When it comes to publishing videos, most people neglect to optimize them — they simply upload them ‘as is’. by the simple act of optimizing videos for certain keyword phrases, it will put you miles ahead of the pack.

2. Tagging videos

Adding tags to videos will also help optimize them. This gives the opportunity to add more related keyword phrases to the video page without coming accross as ‘spammy’. This is an advantage, as trying to stuff extra keywords into the video title and description will often make it unreadable.

The most effective way to do this is find other *popular* videos in your niche with a high view count, and use the same tags.

Doing this increases the chances of your video showing up as a related video, which is shown at the end of the competing video, and sometimes in the sidebar, bringing your video more traffic.

This is very easy to do. it’s a simple case of checking the bottom of the other video to see what tags have been used. no other research is required.

3. Adding backlinks

Building links to your video page is the last tip. Just like before, it’s much the same process you would go through to optimize your own websites.

You don’t have to go too far in garnering backlinks, unless you’re trying to rank for a particularly competetive keyword term. it’s best to simply do some article submissions with the resource box linking to the video, along with a little social bookmarking.

When you’re trying to rank your video for a particular keyword phrase, one thing that will help is to use the actual phrase (and related phrases) as the anchortext of the link for about 70% of the links.

You now know how simple it is to optimize your video submissions. All it comes down to now is taking action. many people are lazy when it comes to this sort of thing, so putting in the extra few minutes for each video will benefit your results massively in the long run..

How to Create Attention Grabbing Videos

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I’m sure if you’ve visited various video sites like youtube, vimeo and metacafe, you’ll probably have noticed the calibre of the videos are not exactly ‘outstanding’. Awful quality of sound, weird technical issues, or just completely boring content can cause the viewer to simply stop watching. The rest of this article will discuss ways to avoid these problems in your own videos.

You should always remember that web visitors have very low attention spans. With this in mind, remember that the shorter the video, the better. if you have a lot of content, splitting it down into smaller videos would be more effective.

Pithier, interesting and shorter videos are usually better. Creating a series of videos on one topic will create higher percieved value, and more information can be spread over multiple installments. If viewers are impressed by your first video, then their will be more incentive for them to come back for more content, or go on straight away to watch your other videos.

Another advantage to multiple videos is that the more videos you have out there, the more likely it will be that your videos will be found and watched.

The other major factor with video creation is the quality of the production.

You don’t need to become qualified as a professional film producer, but it is important to create videos that are engaging and interesting to the viewer.

The key to good videos is sticking to some form of structure or script you’ve thought through, so you don’t miss anything when recording.

A majority of vids are made by people who are not following any structure, and the final result is not too pleasing — too many pauses and taking too long to get to the point.

Adding branding to the videos will also be profitable. if all your videos are related to the same market, adding similar branding to each of them will make your brand more memorable. You could also use high quality stock images and video clips from places like istockphoto.com and bigstockphoto.com in your videos to make them look more professional.

If you are consistent, and use the same stock clip or image at the beginning of every video, people will begin to remember your brand, and associate it with the niche you are marketing to.

Adding a custom ‘skin’ to your videos can also improve veiwing experience. this can be used when embedding videos to your own web properties. Skinning doesn’t only involve the outside of the video, but the controls as well (play, stop etc.), differentiating your videos from the standard youtube displays.

The content may not be different, but the ‘percieved value’ will be higher. Although the video will be the same, the quality is percieved as higher due to the overall presentation.

How “watchable” the video becomes will depend on the type of video created.

Perhaps you are not willing to stand in front of the camera to record videos. if you don’t want to do this, the alternative is to use a screen capture software, or a slide show with audio. Once you have relevant feedback from viewers of your videos, you should become more confident, and perhaps consider advancing to more ‘live action’ videos.

Guide To Getting Started Video Marketing

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Video marketing is a great way to generate more traffic to your website, and it’s becoming bigger every day. Video is really the next “big thing” on the internet, so you need to make sure you’re hitched to that wagon.

A lot of people think video is complicated and hard to create, but it doesn’t have to be.

Sure, if you want to create a green-screen studio and do live videos of yourself it’s going to take some skills (and money) to set up. But that’s not the best option for most people anyway. You need to have a pretty good feel for how your audience will react to your video to make these types successfully.

A much more effective way to create video for most marketers is screen capture. Using software like Camstudio, Camtasia or Screenflow (for the Mac) you can record what’s showing on your computer screen.

{You can do live demos of your products, walkthrough tours of websites, or even record yourself going through a presentation about your topic.

This can work whether you’re selling your own products or promoting other people’s stuff as an affiliate.

Leveraging Your Videos

Once your video is done and uploaded to a sharing site like YouTube (or more effectively, a whole bunch of video sharing sites) it’s fun to watch the views increase.

But that’s not the ultimate goal. Sure, it’s great to get more and more views on your videos, but the ultimate goal is to get people from there over to your website, where you can sell them something, get them signed up for your email list, get a click on your Adsense, or whatever else you actually want them to do.

By including the URL for your website in the video itself and in the description, you will get a certain percentage of viewers who click through to your site. And the better your call-to-action for the click, the higher that percentage will be.

Of course, getting those viewers is the tricky part, so let’s look at a few tips for increasing views.

Getting Viewers

Getting traffic to your videos is similar to any other website. You want to include your keywords in the video title and description, to help get it ranked in the search engines.

If your video is shown in the Google results when people search for your keyword, it WILL get good clickthroughs. Video is still new enough that it really grabs people’s attention.

Promoting your video to your mailing list or on your own website can also help. This will help to increase the views – and hopefully the comments – which will in turn help the video rank higher. It’s kind of a snowball effect, and if it snowballs enough, the video might become viral, which is when the views will really take off.

When people start sharing a video with their friends, and those people do the same (and so on, and so on, and so on) you’ll have more traffic than you ever imagined possible.

Having a video go viral isn’t easy, but if you create unique and interesting content, with a “hook” that gets people interested, it will have a much better chance at it..