Search Engine Optimization

Video marketing is only as complicated as you make it to be. It doesn’t take a huge budget and professional production team to make videos for your business that can help build your brand and educate your target audience. A valuable part of any SEO campaign, an online video does not have to be like a television commercial to be successful!

Here is a breakdown of the video marketing process into 4 easy steps:

1- Create video using clip from workshop/presentation/speech/interview/tour etc…
It should never be a struggle to come up with content for your video marketing campaign. Chances are you are sitting on a treasure trove of video content and you don’t even realize it! Every recorded speech, webinar, presentation, or interview can be broken down into 2-3 minute clips.

For instance, I hold one or two SEO training seminars a year. I decided to record one and ended up with 8 hours of material to work with! When you break 8 hours into 2-3 minute videos, that one seminar provided me with enough content for a year’s worth of video marketing.

2- Submit video to video submission sites
YouTube is the Grand High Poobah of video sharing sites, but that doesn’t mean it is the only player on the block. Video submission sites like Vimeo, Metacafe and DailyMotion are also great places to post your video. Some document sharing sites like SlideShare also allow users to post videos, another opportunity to get your video seen by a larger percentage of your target audience and build your online presence.

3- Post videos on social networking sites and social bookmarking sites
Content creation is nothing without promotion and the same holds true for video marketing. When your videos go live, take the extra step and submit them to all of your social profiles like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Social networks thrive on fresh content and by posting your videos you are giving your connections a reason to stay involved with your brand.

Social bookmarking sites are also a great way to create links to your videos and, by proxy, your website. A recent report found that nearly 50% of all traffic from social media sites comes from StumbleUpon, a wildly popular social bookmarking site. You want to give your video marketing every chance of being found by your target audience.

4- Create blog posts and embed video
To get one more push for your video marketing, you can create a new blog post and embed the video in it. Your readers might miss your social networking update (there is a lot of clutter after all) but if the subscribe to your blog’s RSS feed they will be notified when your video post goes live. By incorporating your video into a blog post, you are also giving yourself the chance to target different keyword and keyword phrases than you did in the title and video description.

Incorporating videos into your online marketing is essential to success. While coming up for ideas for your video marketing may be intimidating at first, the trick is to not over think it! Videos allow you to connect with your target audience in a new and engaging way and don’t have to be expensive to be useful for your customers.

Watch this week’s SEO video lesson here!

For more SEO video tips and lessons from Nick Stamoulis, check out the Brick Marketing SEO video lesson archive .

Content needs to be optimized to help it rank well in the search engines. However, there is a very defined line between spamming and optimizing. While it is important to include appropriate keywords, stuffing those keywords not only detracts from the overall user-experience, it is also considered black hat and can result in a penalty. Components of your content to optimize include: titles, summaries, descriptions, linking and contact information.

Watch this week’s SEO video lesson here!

Video marketing is a great extension of content marketing. Videos let you get your words off a static page and turn them into a new and engaging way to connect with your consumers. The best videos are short (anywhere from 30 seconds to a few minutes) and focus on one main point. People are only willing to give you so much of their time and attention, so you video has to deliver from the get-go. Great video marketing doesn’t require a Hollywood budget and film crew; you can create great content with your computer’s webcam or a small portable camera and a tripod (or helpful coworker).

The hardest part with video marketing, much like content marketing in general, is coming up with informative and interesting topics for your audience.

Here are a few places to look for video content inspiration:

PowerPoint Presentations
A fast and easy way to make a video is simply to record a voiceover over an old PowerPoint presentation. Some computers come with a built-in microphone, but purchasing an external microphone isn’t very expensive. Give the speech you gave when you originally used the PowerPoint, just record and overlay it!

Webinars
Next time you give a webinar, see if the company hosting the webinar allows for you to record the session. You can break the webinar up into shorter segments and post them online periodically.

Interviews
If you’re strapped for ideas, sit down with a member of you company for a short idea. Ask them about the company’s products and services, what the company can do for customers and where the company is headed. An interview can go a long way in humanizing a corporation.

How To or Instructional Videos
Chances are there is someone out there who has bought your product and realized they have no idea how to use it. A how-to video is a great way to introduce your product to your target audience, as well as provide customer services for those who have purchased it. How-to videos can even rank in the search engines when someone is looking for information on your product or other related searches.

Speeches
The VP of Marketing may have given a speech at a recent industry conference, and you’ve got a video copy of it. Cut that speech down into 2 or 3 minutes videos and you’ll have several months worth of content to work with.

Customer Questions
Matt Cutts of Google does this all the time. He answers a question about Google’s algorithm, ranking policy and more by creating a video. If you find that you get asked the same questions over and over, a video might be a quick way to help those customers.

Creating videos is a great way to push your content in an innovative and engaging format, promote yourself or your company as an industry authority, help with your SEO and link building, build your brand reputation, increase online presence and more. In essence, video marketing has the potential to do it all!

I think that where many companies get hung up with video marketing (as it was for me) is that they think videos need to have the budget of a Steven Spielberg film, the effects of a Michael Bay movie and the reach of a James Cameron mega-hit to be successful. But that simply isn’t the case. While having the technical skill and gadgets to create a great looking video is a nice bonus, it really comes down to the content. Without a good script, no amount of money is going to save any of those aforementioned directors from producing a flop.

Videos are great marketing tools for a lot of reasons. First and foremost, people like to watch videos. It’s more entertaining than static text. Videos move and have sound. In short, they often have more personality than an article. This makes it more dynamic and engaging.

Videos are also really useful because they can be concise, while still packing a lot of information. Most people don’t want to watch anything over a few minutes long, but two minutes is a long time to talk about one thing. A video gives you the chance to really delve into a topic and explain it in full without padding it with fluff. You’d be amazed at how much information you can share in a few minutes when you really stick to one thing.

Because videos should be relatively short, you can take a longer video (like a recorded speech from a conference or seminar) and cut it down into short segments. You may have several months’ worth of video material waiting to be sliced and diced from the last time your President spoke at a trade show. This takes a level of pressure off because you don’t have to create new content. It is already there, waiting to be edited down.

There is no limit to what you can do with video marketing. If you’ve ever given a webinar, turn that slideshow with your overlaid voice into a video. Interview your employees and talk about the corporate culture of your company or what new and exciting things you company is doing. Video marketing lets you express your company’s personality while simultaneously branding it.