How Video
Can Enhance A Website
Adding video to a website can greatly
enhance its appeal. It allows communication with customers in a new and
fresh way. The popularity of video on the web is growing rapidly.
YouTube.com, one of the most popular video sites on the web was bought
by Google for 1.65 billion dollars. Google would not put that much into
something that was a fly by night venture.
According to imdediaconnection.com, the number of people who view videos
online has grown from 55 million in 2003 to about 140 million in 2007.
Many people falsely assume that most of these viewers are young and that
they are watching videos of their own content that they have made and
posted to the web. News is actually the most viewed format and viewers
are between the ages of 25 to 44 years old.
When you pair those findings with the fact that broadband Internet is no
longer a luxury item, and the fact that the latest generation of iPods
are now video enabled, it opens up a whole new way to market a business.
As a website owner, you don’t even have to worry about creating videos,
as there are thousands of videos you can place on a website for free.
Try searching sites such as YouTube, Google Video, MSN Video and Yahoo!
Video.
Like everything else on
the Internet, publishing content is only part of the process. Make
sure people view the content by marketing it. Right now, using
online video for business is not as popular as e-mail marketing or
websites, however, it's growing. Keep an eye on this market and
start testing its viability for your business now. You'll be ahead
of the curve and ahead of competition in engaging customers.
Creating a video can easily be accomplished with products such as
Camtasia. Of course, if you are not technically gifted, you could
outsource this task to a virtual assistant.
The following are a few ideas for video use on a website:
• Highlight products and services
• Offer helpful tutorials on subjects visitors want to learn more
about
• Showing people how to use a product
• Create an “about us” video where viewers can see and hear the
passion for a business
• Build a mailing list by offering videos; simply create a form to
collect visitors’ names and email addresses. Use an autoresponder to
automatically send them the link to the videos once they fill out
the form
These are just a few of the ways that video can enhance the appeal
of a website. You may want to give video a try by posting some free
videos to your site. If your website visitors seem to enjoy them,
you may want to consider creating a custom video or hiring someone
to create one for you.
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