Add Video to Your Website - How to Get Your Video Ready for the Web

Got Video? What can video do for your business? People love to watch video. TV. Movies. And of course, online video. Ever here of YouTube? People want to be entertained. The key to utilizing video in your business is to learn how to educate your customers and prospects while entertaining them. Making a good marketing video for example is a matter of telling a story with a call to action at the end. For a marketing professional, that is a piece of cake. But getting your video on your website, on a streaming platform, on a video sharing site like YouTube.com (and there are literally hundreds more!) takes knowledge. Knowing the difference between an MP4, an MOV, an FLV and all the other technical details you need to know about putting web video on line can be daunting to say the least. I want to show you how easy it can be with just a few simple tools and tricks of the trade.

Have you learned by now the many benefits of using video on the web as a form of advertising to generate more profits for your business? If so, you are probably wondering how to get started. Will you market the video by yourself, on your own website? Or will you hire an agency to market it for you. Or do you have yet another strategy. Let's look at the options.

You can base your video publishing success on the statistics you receive about your video. If for example you are advertising on Google, you will get detailed stats about the amount of times your video was viewed and thus how much you will have to pay. Google will share some of that with the publishing websites where you video was placed. This is common internet advertising practice.

Testing your video marketing results is imperative to your success. First you should know how many people click on your video. If you are advertising on more than one site, and one site performs better than another based on the stats, you may want to consider reallocating your advertising dollars differently. If Google places your ad on a blog for instance, and it is getting little or no activity, it would be true that you owe them less in fees, but it also means that no one is watching your ad on that page. When you test and keep track of statistics regarding ad views, you can determine which sites are the most effective with your advertising dollar and which sites are not.

When promoting your own video on your own website, you should test by starting with a baseline of traffic stats. Then use your log files or better still, an analytics package such as Google Analytics, to see if the video is making a difference. Chances are it will. There are also online software solutions that track how often your video is accessed on your site. If you notice that it is being viewed frequently, but the views are not converting your visitors into customers, it is a good bet that you have a great video, you just may want to market it on different sites. If you see only a few people are viewing your video ad on your web page, you may want to try changing you video to one that will garner more attention. This is one way you can determine just how good your video really is. Google Analytics is one of the best ways to track web activity on your sites.

You can also decide to promote your video on one of the many video sharing sites, such as You Tube. Each video shows how many views it has had and if it has been rated by viewers. People often will leave comments on your video. If you come up with something unique or entertaining, you may find your video at the top of the popularaity charts and getting 1,000s of views a day. This does not necessarily translate into 1000's of customers, but it is likely that you may get some fresh visitors to your web page.

So which direction you decide to pursue may depend on how much funding you can afford to spend on advertising. If you have a substantial budget for advertising, you may want to begin by hiring someone that specializes in video ads to come up with a clever video for your campaign. If you do hire out the video production, make sure you purchase the rights to the video so that you can control its distribution. Many advertising companies will insist on retaining the rights. These rights are something that can and should be negotiated ahead of time with the company or individual you hire to create the video.

If you use music in your video creation you will probably need to pay a licensing fee. Often times you can find music clips that are in the public domain, which you are generally free to use anyway you like. Keep in mind that with any public domain work, you should always consult with legal counsel on how you can use the piece. Such a license to use music is called a synchronization license and is usually obtained from the publisher. They will charge by the number of seconds the song is used in the ad in addition to how often the ad is used. This means that you will be paying your advertiser for each view of your video AND you will also be paying the creator of the musical work. The amount of the synchronization license depends on how popular the song is. You can negotiate the fee yourself or hire an attorney to handle the negotiations for you.

There are also many sites such as www.MusicBakery.com that allow you to purchase a license for a one time fee, where you will not have to pay the publisher a royalty for each viewing of your video. These are called "royalty free" music sites.

Another site you may want to look into is www.TubeMogul.com. This is a video publishing site where you can setup a basic account for free and publish to many different video sharing sites. The beauty about this site is that you can use its tracking features to track video views and see which sharing site is performing better.

The point of this is that video is showing up in a big way on the internet today. Web video is being used to convey messages, teach or train your customers, market to your prospects and of course entertain your visitors.

For help with preparing web sites for video, publishing your content on your website, website design or hosting with video in mind, be sure and check out the valuable resources on this page.