Sidenote: This is a picture of Wayne’s World, don’t be alarmed

As outlined only a  few moments ago, brands and businesses that embrace and engage with video marketing for SEO are sitting on an absolute goldmine. Video sites such as YouTube and Daily Motion have levelled the playing field for the small or medium sized marketer. You can now produce and distribute your videos to previously unimaginable levels with little cost and unprecedented distribution channels.

But please don’t adopt the Wayne’s World approach to marketing! Contrary to the pipe dream professed by many, if you simply create a video, they (your audience or potential clients) will not come.

First things first, like anything in life, if your video is no good then you’re at a loss before you even start to market it. Put yourself in your potential clients’ or audience’s shoes for a second and answer the following question…

Does My Video Add REAL Value?

You have to be critical. Your clients certainly will be. If you can safely answer yes to the above question then your next stage is nice and simple. Please follow the instructions laid out in the video marketing for SEO post previous.

But How Can I Build A Business Around Online Video Marketing?

In most cases video can add so much to an existing business:

• builds trust
• grows brands
• appeals to new audiences and new customers

But in some cases it is possible to build a business around online video marketing. Case in point= Bad Mother F@$ker Wallets.

The Bad Mother F@$ker behind this business has ingeniously tapped into the huge fan culture of Quentin Tarantino, and in particular the 1994 movie Pulp Fiction. Incidentally, it’s considered the 5th greatest movie of all time on IMDB. The iconic scenes in the movie (who can forget the opening restaurant scene or “Money”?) have a cult following and are a huge hit on youtube. With that in mind the Bad Mother F@$ker has decided to sell his Bad Mother F@$ker Wallets through the description box of his videos on Youtube.

Have a look at his channel to the left.

You can see how many people have viewed the BMFWallets youtube channel to see just how much exposure is possible. Yes, the total upload views are a staggering 3.6 million people. This clearly needs some perspective however. To have three and a half million people see your marketing message is great but in reality, how many of these people are actually interested in buying your wallets or were interested in buying anything in the first place?

The truth is that conversion rates are likely to be very small. People first and foremost want to be entertained and are in general unlikely to buy. Ok this word of warning is over lets actually see the potential of this. Sure conversion rates are going to be low BUT…

Q: What is 0.1% ( 1 in a 1000 people) of 3.6m?

A: 3,600

That’s potentially 3,600 sales on whatever you might be selling. Now I didn’t bring up this example to massively impress you, but to merely impress upon you the numerous ways in which you can use video in unconventional ways to market effectively.  And Pulp Fiction is most definitely in my top ten movies of all time. So without further ado, lets marvel at the wonder that is the “Money” scene of Pulp Fiction as uploaded by a Bad Mother F@$ker on Youtube…

One last thing… please double click on the video once you’ve watched and check out the marketing involved.

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As outlined in The SEO Method, video marketing really is a goldmine at the moment. People enjoy getting their information from something that they can watch rather than read these days, and with YouTube fast becoming one of the biggest search engines on the planet, it is really a no brainer as to why we would want to market what we do on this site.

So, if we go through what most people do when they upload a video on YouTube, it would sound like a pretty familiar process for most people. First step is to create the video, do some basic keyword optimization for the title, then we upload it, then we embed it on our page. In almost all cases, this is exactly the same process, however, the end result is that your video ends up in a sea of other related videos with no real clear head start. Your video will not rank #1 in YouTube for that keyword, and it will probably only be found by a minority who visit your blog, or who are searching deep results on YouTube. So, apart from the usual keyword optimization, how can we boost the productivity of our videos using SEO? Let me give you a few quick tips.

SEO For Video Marketing

Who would have thought it, that SEO can in fact play a part in our video marketing efforts? You see, the one thing that a lot of us fail to remember is that the majority of YouTube publishers are not internet marketers, and don’t know how to earn a larger audience to their videos. This is where we can use YouTube to our advantage.

Adding a few simple back links to your video can mean a lot. It can mean the difference between ranking low in the search results in YouTube. The thing to consider here is that with YouTube, it is widely believed that there is a distinctive difference between the value of a back link to the page where your video is, and the value of a link when the video is embedded on a page.

There are a few methods that will enable you to increase the amount of back links to your video, all of which I will explain below.

Always Publish The Video On Your Blog

Apart from the factor of the valuable back link, by embedding the video on your blog, this will increase views of your video, and will encourage interaction with the video. If you have information to share, why not share it to your visitors rather than leave it hidden on YouTube. Not only will it provide a back link, but through sharing that post on social media, you will create some kind of buzz about that video as well. Others may share that on forums and their own blogs as well, which if this results in a video being embedded, this will result in more link juice flowing to that video.

Social Bookmarking And Pinging

Every single video that I create is entered into Traffic Bug. For those who are not aware of what Traffic Bug is, it is a service that allows you to enter a URL that corresponds to your website (videos, articles, related posts, etc), and over time, it will submit these URL’s to blog directories, RSS directories, and it will also ping these URL’s to ensure that they are indexed fast.

Now, the back link value of these links that you gain using Traffic Bug is relatively low, however with the lack of webmasters who apply some basic SEO to their videos, the amount of effort required to rank your videos better is relatively low. In almost all cases, you will only need to submit your videos to Traffic Bug, however there is one step further that you can take in this instance, especially if you are finding it difficult to rank a video better.

Submit Your Videos To Blog Directories

This is only really applicable in cases where you are up against some very stiff competition, and in most cases where the competition is relatively low, this method will be extreme overkill.

Most blog networks such as Article Marketing Automation, and Unique Article Wizard, will allow you to submit posts that include videos to be distributed amongst their network of blogs. In a lot of cases, a simple transcription of the video itself will suffice, but you will need to remember that a lot of posts that are distributed amongst the networks are manually approved, to remember to keep quality in mind if you want a large distribution.

In this scenario, you will see your embedded video distributed amongst a potential large number of blogs that all have a varied PageRank, all providing link juice to your video. Although it is an aggressive method, you could easily see yourself ranking much higher for those extremely competitive key phrases in YouTube, and in turn, converting those viewers into website traffic.

These methods, at this point in time, are not widely used amongst webmasters, however with a small amount of effort by putting these methods into action, you could very well see your videos ranking better, not only in YouTube, but in Google itself.

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Video is everywhere! It seems that anyone with a camera or even a mobile phone is uploading a video these days. The internet is teeming with road trips, tutorials, marketing spiels, viral creations and vlogs. And thanks to You Tube, they’re here to stay.

You Tube is now the second largest search engine in the world after Google. Here’s why. Approximately 20 hours of video are uploaded to You Tube every single minute. That’s like Hollywood releasing 86,000 new movies per week! On a daily basis, over 100,000,000 videos are being watched on the site. Staggering! So what does this mean for your business?

Jump on board. Now. The New York Times states that video is now the fastest-growing segment of the Internet advertising market. Video SEO is integral to any online marketing strategy, but how do you break through the clutter? We’ve all been emailed links to videos of talking dogs, people falling off things and celebrities without makeup. True, that type of content exists and will continue to do so, but having your own marketing videos on You Tube is a powerful business tool if you know what you’re doing. Video optimization is a process that will help you stand out in your niche. The more you know about video search optimization, the greater your opportunity to be ranked at the top of You Tube.

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Of course, we should all know by now the power of video marketing. In a day and age where people are less inclined to sit and read a book or text from a website, rather they would learn more from a medium that is more engaging such as video. Having said that, it is a vital part of any SEO campaign to ensure that you create videos to market across the video streaming platform. Websites such as YouTube, Vimeo, and Viddler all attract large amounts of attention, and can also return good results in the search engines.

It is a common misconception in the webmaster world that you can simply build something, and people will come in droves. This is most certainly not true, unlike a shop front which is built in your local town which doesn’t rely on search engines, a website is simply hidden until a user is directed to it. Keyword optimization, off page SEO, all of these things are an influencing factor in how well our websites rank in the search engines, however certain off page methods also require similar attention.

Pointer One – Video length and content

Stating the obvious, video creation will always be your first step. At this point, you need to think of the average user, what length video do they want to watch? What kind of content are they after? What can you add to the video in order to draw attention back to your main site? Personally, I find that the average user will not want to watch the full length of a video more than five minutes long, any longer than this, you will find that users will skim through content and not get the most out of it. Of course, the shorter and more catchy is always better. A few brief guidelines that I like to follow when creating videos:

1. Make sure that the viewer knows who I am before they get into the main content
2. Give the viewer some compelling content that is unique to you and not copied. Make it short enough to keep their attention (Preferably under 3 – 5 minutes)
3. Ask a compelling open question that inspires a lot of thought, and a desire to know the answer
4. Tell them where to go to see more

As long as I follow these points, I can always be guaranteed that a large majority of those who view my videos will be compelled enough to visit my website for more information, read more than three pages on site, and maybe even sign up to my mailing list. The only other thing that will demand your attention from here is how to market that video to the masses.

Pointer Two – Keyword Optimization

Of course, we are going to need to apply some SEO for our video marketing, if we would like our videos to be discoverable that is. Creating great titles with SEO in mind is one thing (detailed in this SEO Writing Post) but strategies for keyword optimization in videos can take on a different shape. Let me explain…

In Google organic results, there will always be a listing of YouTube videos relating to your query, which means of course that if you optimize your videos properly using the right keywords, you will easily, and quickly receive free organic listings for your video. The key here is to work with keywords that receive traffic, and that don’t have organic listings for video in Google already. For this, keyword research can be done using a combination of the search engines itself to check if video content is listed for a particular keyword, and the Google Keyword tool. Your best keyword is always going to be the one that receives the highest number of queries that is not returning video results in Google.

Video optimization is quite easy, with a little research and understanding, you too can rank high in Google with organic video results. Before reading this, were you aware of the power of video marketing? If the answer is no, then I think that you have some videos to create and market!