With increased rate of internet users turning to online video to satisfy their needs for entertainment and information it follows that as marketers we need to become savvy in yet another medium. This may seem daunting, but it's becoming easier to put a message into video as the software tools develop features geared towards new users and the cost of equipment and software continues to drop.



What To Put On Video

In the savvy marketing circles people know that to promote a product or service, generating good quality articles is a vital part of the advertising make-up. Articles are typically written about a particular topic and then distributed. These generally then go to your own site, another webmasters site, or into an article directory where it can be found by webmasters looking for your kind of content.

Video is the new article posting.

Any existing material you have in written form can be made into video by you just talking about it (don't read verbatim) or making it into a presentation. There are, of course, special consideration with video in that it does need to be engaging and relate something unique that cannot be put into an article.

This can be a voice-over while going through a powerpoint presentation, or better yet a demonstration done on your computer of how to use a certain piece of software or technique for running your business.

How To Get The Raw Material (Content is Still King)

A very simple way to get content into your video is just to talk to a video camera about the topic you have chosen. Some people are more comfortable with this than others, but having yourself "front and center" you put a human face on your business. People connect with people and a connection will be made to your business through you.

There is also screen capture software that will make a video of actions you take on your computer. Demonstrate using or ordering your product. Go through your ordering process to demonstrate the simplicity and security of ordering as well as what happens after the order is placed.

Putting It Together

A very good tactic is to combine the two. You can do a short introduction where you talk to the camera and mention what will take place. Then switch to the screen capture video demonstrating your product or ordering process.

The basic software needed to edit video comes free with many computers (iMovie with Apple Macintosh computers and Roxio software with many PCs). This software will allow you to put together video taken from different sources, add subtitles with your site URL and other effects that you may want to play with.

Then you save the file as something that can be uploaded to your site or a video hosting service.

Finding An Audience

This is the really easy part. Now that you have your video ready to go, you just submit it for free to video hosting sites. The video submission process has a lot in common with the article submission process you may already be familiar with. Just go to site like YouTube, Google Video, AOL Video and others to sign up for an account.

Each site will have instructions on how to place the video in their archive, assign keywords (tags) to it, put it in the right category etc. One of the big advantages to having these kinds of sites host your video is that you can now show the video on your own site without taking up your web server's bandwidth or disk space.

Now is a great time to learn how to do online video. Since this medium is still pretty new you can get away with some pretty bad stuff at first and still get links and traffic from it"amateur". Now is a great time to practice since as time goes on people are going to expect higher quality production.