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..
