Top Tips to marketing your product using Video

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.

The new internet, or Web 2.0 as it’s become known, is driven by multimedia. It’s this new multimedia environment that we find ourselves in as internet marketers.

Typically a new marketing campaign would fellow the well trodden PPC path. The cost of clicks in PPC however has risen to the point were campaigns with even double digit CTR’s are no longer profitable, even without taking into account how effective video marketing is at generating traffic.

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.

The process of making a marketing video is quite straightforward, given the wealth of software applications available. For a few hundred dollars, we can have all the programs we need to produce our videos.

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 is quite simple. Taking the embed codes from the hosting sites, such as Google Video for example, also carries across embedded videos from other users.

Since all videos are in specific categories, we could well end up providing free advertising and web space to one of our competitors, which might well result in lost sales, particularly if our competitor’s video has been rated and viewed more times than our own.

The safest and most efficient way to add our own videos to our own marketing websites, is to convert these to a flash format and add the resulting flash video to our site. To do this we need a reliable video converter.

By their very nature, videos are large files. Most of the video hosting sites place restrictions not only on the length of videos they accept, but also on the size. Typically, 100 MB and 10 minutes would be a good indication of an acceptable video, which also gives a good picture of the file sizes involved.

This video conversion takes time and for most of us, this our computer is fully occupied for this time, meaning we can’t do any of the other tasks our online marketing requires.

As internet marketers we should learn the value of our time and how to use this resource more effectively. Video is an equally effective resource and if we can combine efficient use of both these resources, our marketing efforts will succeed.

All too often I see people investing big money in the latest and greatest video production software, without thinking about the marketing of the videos they produce. Usually they end up with amazing videos that nobody ever sees. Why? Because they didn’t consider the conversion stage.

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.