How to make your own videos

Before we begin, allow me to get your attention. It does not do any good to post this if your not going to take it serious or even read it.

My youtube account was created in April of 2007. In the past 24 months I have posted 320 home made videos. This has provided my site with a steady stream of targeted traffic. The bounce rate from my youtube account is around 18%. My bounce rate from generic google search results is around 48%. That is a 30% difference. When someone lands on my forum from my youtube account, they are 60 times more likely to create an account then someone from google.

Every 30 days, youtube sends about 10,000 uniques to my forum, its my 3rd highest source of traffic and has the second lowest bounce rate.

In other words, youtube videos can provide your site with some VERY targeted traffic.

Do I have your attention now? If so, lets get to work.


Items needed:

Digital camera that films in mpg or AVI format and films video in at least 30 frames a second. These are usually standard features. Except maybe kodak, some of their cameras film in a MPG4 format.

For filming a stationary target, I recommend getting a tri-pod. Cheap ones can be found for maybe $20.

Windows XP service pack 2 or 3 or vista (I dont know about windows 7). Included in those operating systems is Windows Movie Maker. WMM is a free basic video editing platform. It will do the basic things such as splicing, adding credits, adding music,,, but no real special effects.

Film the video, import it to your computer and edit with windows movie maker.


Optimization:

At the start of the video, insert a title with the name of your website. Make this is contrasting color, maybe white text on black background. There are some effects that you can do with the text, but sometimes less is more.

Make the introduction no more then 8 - 10 seconds. Keep it short and sweet. My personal videos have about a 5 second introduction caption with my website name.

Do not try to act too professional. Viewers will be able to tell when your trying to fake it. Just be yourself.

Split apart long sections of video. Put in a slice, cut out a few seconds, do something to give the viewers a break from just watching your boring self stand there and talk.

Do something different, get outside, go to a park - but do "something" to get you away from the computer desk. There are tens of thousands of videos on youtube of people sitting there, at their computer desk, using their webcam. Your videos have to stand out to be noticed.

State the facts in a clear manner.

Think about what your going to say before you say it. But try not to use a written script.

If you lose track while filming the video, take a deep breath, think about what your going to say and then say it. In the editing phase, edit that pause out. This will provide you with one of the "breaks" that was mentioned earlier.

Provide quality information.

When you save the video to your computer, save it in a high bitrate. There is an option to make the video fit a certain file size - that is the option I use. And increase the file size until its maxed out. This should be around a 2 meg bitrate.

Upload the video:

The most popular video site is youtube, but its not the only one. To reach maximum exposure, sign up for at least 6 video sites. Here are some examples - youtube, break, yahoo video, metacafe, veoh, vimeo, my space video, daily motion,,,,,,,

Title - short, sweet and use targeted keywords.

Description - Your sites web address goes on the first line. After that, use targeted keywords in the first couple of sentences.

Tags - keywords


Multiple video sites

My videos to youtube first and given a certain title. Then I use a service called tubemogul. The video is uploaded again to tubemogul, given a different title then the youtube video and then pushed out to 9 different video hosting sites.

The last video I uploaded was last night and was 96 megs. It took around 30 minutes to upload to youtube, then another 30 to upload to tubemogul. From there the video was pushed out - that took another 20 minutes or so. In an hour and twenty minutes, I had my video posted on 10 different video hosting sites.


The future of your site:

Go to yahoo news - its loaded with videos. Go to foxnews - its loaded with videos. Go to my blog and forum - and its loaded with videos.

What are you waiting on? Videos are a growing trend in all aspects of websites, forums and blogs. In comparison, videos are like the car. When the car was introduced to the public, the horse and buggy owners thought it was just a fad. Nobody will ever buy a car. Their noisy, you have to buy gasoline, they get stuck in the mud,,,,,. And we see where we are today. The car won and the horse and buggy lost.

With anything else on the internet, your either head of the curve, in the curve or behind the curve. If your not publishing videos, your behind the curve. This trend was taking a strong foothold at least 2 or 3 years ago. But, some website owners are still behind the times.


My Personal Experience:

My original forum was started in April of 2006. From April 2006 - March 2007 the results were really poor. I tired all kinds of stuff - link building, directory submission, posting articles,,, all of the stone age suggestions. But nothing I did ever brought my forum very much traffic.

The market niche I was trying to tap into was already flooded with sites that had thousands of members and had been online for years. So I knew that I had some tough competition.

The forum was closed in March 2007, reopened in April 2007 with VBulletin. And this is when I opened my youtube account. The first 3 or 4 months showed the typical results, with very little to no traffic. Somewhere around 4 to 5 months traffic started picking up. People were signing up and posting that they saw my videos on youtube - or some site that was leaching videos from youtube.

2 years later my forum has - 625,282 post, 15,634 members, 51,055 threads, 4,404 active members (visiting every 30 days) and around 1,300 - 1,400 members visiting every 24 hours. On average my forum gets 1,500 - 2,300 post every day.


Notice:
I (Kevin) is the owner of this article.

This post has been promoted to an article

 

I was just reading the latest PC World issue (September 2009) and it has an article about business promotion with online video. As soon as I read it, I immediately thought of Kevin and his YouTube promotion strategy.

Here is the article: Promote Your Business With Online Video - Business Center - PC World