The Traffic Generation Kick-off: Video Marketing Made Easy
Video marketing is a relatively new method to drive traffic to websites on a consistent basis. And by “new” I mean less than 5 years old.
I know what you’re thinking…
Right now you’re telling yourself that you do not want to get into video marketing until you have the funds to make high quality videos. Hopefully by the end of this post, your opinion has changed.
Here are some statistics for you taken by comScore, Inc (NASDAQ: SCOR), a well known digital marketing intelligence agency:
* 78.6 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.
* The average online video viewer watched 385 minutes of video, or 6.4 hours.
* 107.1 million viewers watched 6.8 billion videos on YouTube.com (63.5 videos per viewer).
* 49 million viewers watched 387 million videos on MySpace.com (7.9 videos per viewer).
* Hulu accounted for 2.4 percent of videos viewed, but 4.2 percent of all minutes spent watching online video.
* The duration of the average online video was 3.5 minutes.
Now I don’t know about you, but I sure as hell would want to tap into some of those statistics.
Since Google bought YouTube back in 2006, many of their videos have been appearing on the first page of Google’s search results.
This is prime real estate for Internet marketers to get that coveted first page ranking for moderate traffic keywords.
How Powerful Is Video Marketing?
Well lets take a look at the keyword “How to ride a bike”.
Below is a screenshot of the Google search results:
As you can see, a YouTube video is within the top 4 spots with over 70 million competing pages. Not too shabby! When I clicked on the video, it was some low-tech 1980′s guy (sorry if you are a reader of this blog) showing people how to ride a bike. It has 70,000+ views so far.
Additionally, I did some keyword research on this term to find out exactly how many searches this keyword gets per month.
(Click on the picture to enlarge)
According to Google, this term is getting 33,000+ searches per month! Seems like a lot of people want to learn how to ride a bike.
Anyhow, time to get down to the important stuff… I’m sure you want to know how to get a ranking in Google.
I’m not going to try to explain SEO (Search Engine Optimization) in this post, but basically Google rankings are a popularity contest. The more backlinks (links from other people’s sites linking back to your site) you have, the better search engine love you’ll get.
A quick way to determine your competitions backlinks is to use Yahoo’s site explorer. Don’t worry, its completely free.
As you can see, this video only has 12 backlinks pointing to it! Basically, in theory, all you would have to do to grab this spot (if you had a video on “how to ride a bike”) is to out promote your competition by building more backlnks.
Two posts ago I showed you how to comment on blog posts. This is a great way to build backlinks to your content and gain some authority in Google’s eyes.
I hoped this opened your eyes to the power of video marketing. Believe it or not, I find the competition to be much less in the video directories (YouTube, Metacafe, etc.) than in most article directories.
Don’t worry about the quality of your videos. A simple PowerPoint presentation recorded with a free screen-capture software called Camstudio is all you need. Throw in a voice-over if you’re feeling fancy and you’re done!
A pretty cool piece of software that has gotten some good reviews on the Warrior Forum is GFX Video Writer. (not an affiliate link) Basically what the software does is create the video for you from an article you’ve already written. Pretty easy if you ask me.
Okay, that’s all for today! Get out there and start making some videos for your selected niche!
Monday and Tuesday I’ll reveal my two favorite traffic generation tactics! Stay tuned!
I want to know what you think, so leave me some comments please.
I basically only use video to build backlinks to my money page, but surprisingly they do get a lot of veiws. I currently use Online Video Story. This software will take a text file and for this example, lets say you have 5 lines of text in your text file, you can just drag and drop the text file into the software and it automatically creates the slides for your video. This is the easiest video software I’ve found and the only one I use. Its limited since you can only do pictures/slides/text, and you can’t add your own voice over, but you can add music to it if you want. But then again, I’m not going for fancy, I just want some backlinks from youtube and the other video directories.
Thanks for the comment Brian… I never heard of that software. I’ll have to check it out.
To piggyback on your other post, one thing I’ve done in the past to help boost my video’s traffic is to submit a pdf to docstoc and scribd. You can easily just submit the same doc to both and there’s 2 good sources of traffic to your videos right there.
Oh, I couldn’t agree more. I use all my traffic generation techniques to all my content… not just any particular money site.
I’m sure you’ve heard of the linkwheel concept. If you haven’t, then maybe I’ll do a post on that in the future.
I have Online Video Story and it is simple and produce a very good looking results. I like much better than Article Video Robot, which is similar but it is monthly membership.
I really do need to check out some of this software. Do you have a link to a video it’s created for you?
Adam, here is one I did with it, I obviously messed up with not putting my domain name at the bottom right and did not add any music or anything, but this is a basic video using the software:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFD9kovjALM
And I just noticed I got 227 views for this vid that took 5 minutes to throw together!
Not bad. Simple, but gets the job done. 227 views is decent for 5 minutes of work. Do you track the amount of visitors you’ve gotten from it?
But Brain, 207 views might be because of the niche your video is related with. People might search for some interesting stuffs and info from you tube regarding making money. And so your Forex Neotrino video worked out! There is nothing special which Online Video Store did for you I believe. Video is pretty simple. Anyway, a free software with five minutes of time spent on it is worth doing it.
Hi Adam,
another great idea and eye openner.
As you said using video for the first time can be a bit scary,
I haven’t tried yet, but with your post and all those comments, I’ m sure to try that soon.
Thanks.
Gerard.
Thanks for highlighting those statistics. I hadn’t seen those before. Good tip on the software, too.