News: Using Video In Online Marketing

This article is going to talk about video and only about video. Why? Because video is very important for any size of business. Even small businesses can use video to promote themselves on the internet. And in the next few years, you're going to see more and more businesses using video. Even now, I'm going to show you some articles that have been written on different websites talking about video and how small businesses can use them and how businesses need to use them now, especially to rank on Google. Google counts videos as part of their algorithm they use to determine how strong your webpage or website is. If you don't have video now on your website it can hurt you. They actually give preference to sites and pages, which have video on them. 

It's really important for a number of different reasons. Also, of course video is a great way to advertise things. I'm going to talk that a little bit in my next article. But I'd like to mention to you first a site and you can go and see it for yourself. It's called Savory Cities and it's at http://www.savorycities.com. Three and a half years ago when I first saw the site and what they were doing, I knew then that video was the future of the internet and that this is how websites were going to promote and advertise themselves and get traffic. It is so powerful. 

You may say, "I am only a small business and we really don't have the capability to make videos." But I'll tell you, when I first started a couple years ago I used a little Fuji still camera that can take video. It cost about $125. I used this and made about 80 videos. I got a lot of good responses and a lot of good results for my clients. So, you don't need to spend a lot of money. I learned how to use Sony Vegas, which is an editing program. You don't have to learn how to edit videos. There are lots of kids running around now who know how to use these programs. You can probably find some college or high school students in your area that would work inexpensively and like to create some videos for you. It's a pretty quick process because you are not to be doing complicated stuff. You're going to be doing a lot of stuff like what I am doing here which is sitting in front of the camera and talking to you and telling you things. You can use still photographs of your business along with videos. 

You can make slideshows. Slideshows are very effective. I've used slideshows on a number of occasions for people. All you need is photographs, a video editing program, and you do a voiceover. And there you go. There is a video. You can do these really easily. There are a lot of different ways to do it. I'm going to talk about some things that we do. But it is not something you should be intimidated by. In some of the follow-up articles I'll be writing I'll talk about how to use Sony Vegas. It's a pretty simple program. You can get much more complicated programs. You can get some that are simpler than Vegas but don't really have the capability

Vegas to me is a lot easier and I'm going to show you how to do some of those things as well. But it's not that difficult. The biggest problem you have if you are using the camera like I just showed you, or even a lot of the small camcorders, is the sound. For video quality sometimes you can get away with not having top quality visuals, but you have got to have good sound. If people can't hear the sound good then you're lost. What we do is instead of using sound from the camera microphone, we record audio on a small digital recorder, because in most rooms you get a real echo filled sound. It doesn't sound that good. 

So what I do is record everything on a little digital recorder. It's just a little Sony recorder. My clip-on microphone is plugs into it. What I will do is after I finish filming I'll bring the video into my editing program and I will delete the audio track off the video and I will add the audio track from the recorder to it and sync it up and it sounds great.

This recorder cost around $90. Equipment is very inexpensive. Light can also a big problem, if you're in some dark locations. When I first started making videos I was doing a lot of videos in restaurants, which is tough because they don't have a lot of lighting. Some did and it was OK, but a lot of them didn't. I bought these little lights to use and that helped some. But you don't really want to get into that level and in most times you are not going to need to. I'll cover more on this in future articles but for now the important thing is get out and start shooting and editing and you'll see how easy it really is.

Tom Aikins is an SEO consultant and online marketing expert based in Bangkok who presents seminars on these subjects and also offers a complete online marketing training course on his website, http://www.seonorthamerica.com. You can ask questions of him by contacting tom.aikins@gmail.com.