Written by: Benjamin Ravaru, Guest Author
Many years ago when I started marketing online with the usual web-page sales letters, I was living in fear that one day everything would move to video. If that happened, would the little guy still be able to compete with big companies and their video budgets?
Fast forward to 2010, and the answer is an emphatic YES.
There’s an explosion of homemade videos online. YouTube has become the 3rd most-visited website in the world. Video gets higher conversion rates and builds a deeper relationship than print ads. But the really exciting news is that it’s easier than ever to make videos at home.
Cameras are cheap. You can buy a Flip or Kodak Zi8 for under $200 and record great HD videos at home. Keynote andPowerPoint make it easier than ever to create beautiful screen-casts. Tools like Camtasia and Screenflow make it easy to capture your videos and put them online in the cloud using a service like Amazon S3. You can then play them back with tools like Flowplayer or JW Player.
There are more sources of great content than ever before, including royalty-free music, photographs, and videos on sites like iStockPhoto.com.
But even with all of these tools, not all videos are created equal, and not all videos convert. So what are the keys that will guarantee your video is a success? To achieve big video profits, I recommend the following:
1. Great Script: Take time to sit down and write a script for your video. You might be a great narrator, but you need to think of your video as your spoken sales letter or sales presentation. A great script with a killer intro makes a huge difference in whether your video converts into sales.
2. Interesting Hooks: Make interesting promises and deliver on them, or have nice visual effects and/or music. Anything that can hold people’s attention is worth its weight in gold in these times of multitasking and short attention spans.
3. Keep It Clean: Make sure to remove the noise from your audio recordings and use image enhancing effects for your photos. You want clear sound and sharp contrasts. It doesn’t cost any money to do this, just a bit of time. It will really separate your video from the mass of videos out there and give you that professional edge.
4. Easy to Read Text: Make your text high-contrast, so it stands out against the background of your video. Big, black, bold text is a good rule of thumb, unless black won’t show up against your background.
5. Reasonable File Size: Resize your video to be between 500×300 and 800×600. Any less than that and the video is too small; more and it’s too big. When compressing your video, use the H.264 compression codec with the compression settings set to “best” to ensure a good file size.
6. Promote Other Video Products: As obvious as this may sound, it’s best to use video to promote an offer that uses video on its sales page too. Having a nice video presell as an affiliate and sending people to a non-video offer can kill conversions. The feeling of continuity and flow is important.
7. Always Be Testing: This is true of any selling or promotional techniques, and it holds for video too. Don’t get complacent, and always fine tune your scripts and videos. You can always improve your conversion rate and make more profits.
