We hear a lot nowadays about how video marketing is becoming more and more important, both for traffic generation & SEO as well as for site performance.
This is true, but getting value through your video marketing in the early stages can be challenging and causes many to give up entirely.
As with most things getting started is the hardest thing; how do you produce and market your videos in a short space of time and on a tight budget?
This post will give you some pointers to 4 tools that will enable you to produce and market a video within 2 hours – often less. The plan is that there will also be no on-going costs apart from the time that you put in.
Screenflow/Camtasia
A quick and easy entry point into producing your own videos is to create “How to” videos using videos of your computer screen. This means that you do not have to worry about lighting, green screens, dressing well, make-up etc etc. You simply need to install a screen capture video program onto your computer and get going.
I have highlighted 2 of the most well known products here; Camtasia and Screenflow. Both are easy to get to grips with and both cost just $99 for a lifetime license.
With a screen cast video you can add music, voice over, intro’s, outro’s, annotations, images. This all allows a great deal of creativity, but it is also simple to just get started with the basics of videoing your computer screen.
From both of these tools you can publish direct to Youtube or Vimeo. Hopefully they will also start allowing direct publishing to Oneload soon (see below).
Oneload (AKA TubeMogul)
Oneload is a tool that allows you to publish your videos to multiple video sites from a single upload. This means that you can send your video to Youtube, Vimeo, Metacafe, Viddler, BlipTV, DailyMotion etc all at the same time. Initially you will need to visit all of these websites to set up an account. This can be pretty time consuming as you need to ensure that you take the time to get your channel looking nice and well optimised for showcasing your video content once it is there (allocate a day to doing this). Then once you have an account on each of these video sites you will need to link them all to your Oneload account – this is very straightforward, although quite time consuming (maybe 1 hour).
Once you have everything looking good and linked together then you will simply need to upload your videos to Oneload and hit publish for them all to be sent off to your channels on these sites in one easy action (taking about 5 minutes in total each time you upload a video).
Hootsuite
Hootsuite (http://hootsuite.com/dashboard) is a social media management tool that allows you to manage your Twitter, Linkedin and Facebook accounts all in one place. Once you have created a video and uploaded it to all of the video sites then you can send out tweets and Facebook updates that link to your video on these sites.
You should also take the embed code for the video from Youtube (or another one of the sites) and put it onto a page on your website and link to this from Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin. Your site should become the primary location for the video marketing.
Shareaholic / Addthis
If you have a website/blog then you have probably already put on social sharing buttons using an app such as Addthis or Shareaholic. If not then you should get them on there fast. However, both of these tools come with browser applications too that allow you to share content with 100’s of social networks and social media sites such as Digg, Delicious, Reddit and Stumble Upon. It is simply a 10-20 second job to publish your pages to each of these sites so within 5 minutes you can list to about 20 or 30 sites. That said, in order to get real value (traffic) from these websites you will need to spend some time networking and sharing fun/interesting content on them.