One thing that makes learning how to screencast SO attractive to marketers is that they are easily bundled up and sold – via ClickBank and an affiliate program, for example. Video based products (and your audience doesn’t really distinguish between screencasts and video – they are one in the same to her) have a high perceived value, so they convert well and command a decent price.

Not surprisingly, this means many people have rushed onto the market with hastily-prepared, shoddy screencast-based products.

I know.

I’ve bought a few.

Now to be fair, in the cases where I have been less than pleased with the quality of the product I have purchased, it was not the content I was annoyed with. It was usually “fine”.

To me, “fine” means I learned enough from the product to justify the cost of the purchase. If I can get that much out of a product, I never ask for a refund.

So if it wasn’t the content, what was it?

It was the presentation and the delivery.

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Implementing  a YouTube marketing strategy to leverage your business – whether it be online or off – is a smart idea for numerous reasons…

1. YouTube is – at the time of this writing – the third most highly trafficed site on the Internet. That’s a lot of potential eyeballs for your marketing message.
2. YouTube is owned by Google, and Google is happy to feature relevant videos prominently in its search results. This exposes your videos to a “non” YouTube audience, and since Google is also the most trafficed site on the Internet, that’s one heck of a large audience.
3. As an “informational medium” most people prefer videos over text. It is, after all, what most of them are used to. Plus, when it’s done properly, it’s more engaging and viewers are more willing to respond to your offer.

So, given that you’re going to investigate marketing with YouTube, how can you squeeze the most out of your listing? Here are 6 tips to get the most out of YouTube…

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Lately, most of my video creation work is done using a combination of PowerPoint and Camtasia, or in Sony Vegas. So although I do maintain a “Pro” Animoto account, I haven’t actually logged in and had a look around for a while.

That changed last night after my girlfriend Marilyn pulled me aside to ask me what I thought of the video she put together for her web site, Flowers-By-Marilyn. I was blown away.

Check it out – just click on the screen image to open the video…

Not bad for a total “non-techie” video solution, huh?

Seems in my absense, Animoto has a released 28 themes upon which you can build your videos. Now you can go much further than creating “slideshow” videos that feature simple transitions between photos with a soundtrack playing in the background.

The themes vary greatly, of course. The one featured above works well for Marilyn’s subject matter, but it certainly doesn’t for mine. But there appear to be plenty of variations in the provided themes, so likely there’s something there for everyone.

Of course, I’m not suggesting Animoto is for everyone. But these new themes really do turn things up a notch, ratcheting up the level of professionalism in your videos.

The bottm line, therefore, is simple…

If you’re looking for an easy, tech-free, plug and play solution to video creation, sign up for Animoto’s free service and give it a whirl. If it works for you, you can upgrade to the Pro account later.

Very cool!

As you no doubt have figured out, if you have spent any time on this site, I’m pretty stoked about video marketing, and how to leverage it for my businesses going forward. We are, after all, in its infancy.

One great “fit” I see for video marketing is for non-internet based local offline businesses (this is in addition to just about every other online business on the planet). Utilized properly, even the most elementary videos, positioned the right way, can be used to  dramatically increase leads, sales, business and revenue.

To illustrate why, one need only to consider a few salient points from a post I made a few days ago (“7 Reasons Why Video Marketing Is Critical To Your Business“). In it, I explain that videos…

• Engage viewers.
• Build trust and credibilty.
• Establish a personal rapport with your audience.
• Increase the likelihood of a purchase.

Let’s apply this to an offline business.

For example, suppose you need to hire a plumber or an electrician.

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I must admit, I investigated the Build My Rank (BMR) network with some caution. Had a trusted friend not raged about the service and its effectiveness, I probably never would have checked into it. However, curiousity got the best of me, and over I went.

As you are no doubt aware, in-pointing links continue to be a huge factor in obtaining decent search engine rankings, and accordingly, traffic. In the olden days (and by “olden”, I mean 5 or 6 years ago) you could put up a web site, and – provided you had done some keyword research and targeted the appropriate words and phrases – start receiving traffic almost immediately. I find that no longer seems to be the case. You simply must have links- and lots of them – if you expect to see traffic.

Build My Rank is, of course, a link building system; it’s a large network of authority sites (with Google PRs ranging from 1-6, according to the advertising) which you can gain access to for a very reasonable monthly fee.

For $59/month, you can set up profiles for 5 web sites (a subdomain counts as a separate web site) and obtain an unlimited amount of links for any URL within those 5 domains.

Here’s how it works…

Once you have accessed the BMR system by signing up for the free trial, you create short, 150-word “posts” which contain a link to whatever URL on whatever site you happen to be promoting.

The posts then enter a queue until a staff member reviews them for quality. Should they pass muster, they are then posted to their network. Once they are posted, you can login to the dashboard, and check the PR of the sites your links are posted on, and whether or not those links have been indexed by the search engines (the exact URLs of the links are not revealed, to protect the integrity of the network. Decent link tracking software should identify them, however).

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I don’t for the life of me remember EXACTLY how I came across Mike and Troy’s “Feeding The Panda“, but I can tell you this; I’m darn glad I did.

I do, of course, remember that I was looking for a credible search engine optimization (SEO) discussion that was written AFTER Google’s Panda update, which as you know, pretty much changed the rules of the SEO game. Additionally, some of my sites had been hit pretty hard by the Panda update, and – since I have always been 100% focused on creating superlative quality content to keep both Google and my audience happy – I was less than happy with the demotion.

Yeah, yeah I know; lots of people say they create great quality content, but when you check it out for yourself, you’ll find that’s not the case. However, that  very definitely was the case here; the material on my UltimateFatBurner.com site, for example, is meticulously researched, unique, and well written. Check out a couple of examples for yourself and be the judge; here, here and here!

Of course, I found lots of PRE-Panda SEO stuff, as well as material that I could not ascribe a date to, so it was impossible to assess how credible it continued to be, early 2011.

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It seems a bit odd to be pronouncing declarations of love for a WordPress anti-spam plugin, doesn’t it?

Indeed it does.

But rest assured, I do not possess a bizarre fetish clearly indicative of a dire need of psychological help.

No, I love Akismet because since installing it the other day, it has completely KILLED the mountains of comment spam I was getting on a regular basis. I bet you I spent 15 minutes once or twice a week deleting the damn stuff from my various different domains and subdomains.

Yes, yes, I know; I should have investigated an anti-spam measure ages ago, but the spam deleting process always seemed to happen in the middle of some critical task and I never got around to it.

Then the other day, when the e-mail notifications for about 200 spam comments flowed into my inbox, I suddenly got to thinking how much time this spam was eating up on a monthly basis, and what that time was actually worth to me.

That did it; procrastination over.

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If you want your screencasts to be informative and engaging, you’re going to have to add your own audio, most likely in the form of a voice over. If you are doing a simple screencast, you’ll record your audio as you demonstrate “whatever it is you are demonstrating” on the screen.

If you’re combining PowerPoint and Camtasia based content in your screencasts, you’ll record the  audio for both segments seperately.

And of course,  to do this properly, you’ll need a decent quality microphone. A $20 headset from BestBuy isn’t going to cut it, I’m afraid. You need something better to deliver a quality recording. Plus, since you’ve already invested in Camtasia – maybe even PowerPoint – it doesn’t make sense to compromise quality now.

The good news is a decent quality USB microphone – one that you just plug into your computer’s USB jack – can be had for an extremely reasonable price.

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In yesterday’s post, I outlined 7 reasons why video marketing is critical to your business.

Today, I’m going to talk a little bit about why your videos really need to be compelling, too. Whether your video is designed to PRESell, educate or to entertain, you must do everything possible to ensure that once your visitor clicks the “play” button, she is going to stick around to the end.

Because statistically, odds are she is not.

Consider this pertinent data from last year’s Visible Measures report…

• 20% of viewers of online video click away from the video within 10 seconds because it doesn’t hold their attention.
• At 30 seconds, approximately 33% of your viewers have moved on.
• At 60 seconds, 44% have left for greener pastures.
• At 2 minutes 60% are gone.

To me, this data suggests a couple of things…

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So you’ve decided to investigate video marketing. You’re pumped at the idea of investigating the option to use online video to build, expand, or leverage your online business. But after several hours of reading and trying to get a handle on the logistics of how to create compelling videos that will engage your audience AND market them effectively you begin to wonder…

Is it really worth it? Why bother with video marketing? (No doubt this question is even more prominent in your mind if you’re running a single person operation looking to carve out a living on the Internet).

There are lots of compelling reasons…

1) Your competitors are already immersed in it.

Or if they’re not, they are getting into it. BIG time. This is just as true for an affiliate marketer in a narrow niche as it is for a huge company selling 1,000′s of SKUs online. If there’s any good news, it’s that we’re still in the infancy stage of online video marketing, and there’s still plenty of time to jump aboard.

2) There are no technical barriers holding you back.

Anyone – no matter what their level of expertise happens to be – can get some sort of video-based content online. Whether it’s simple slide-show based material created with Animoto’s free tool, articles converted to video with an affordable, plug and play tool like ArticleVideoRobot, or material uploaded directly to YouTube from a simple, $100 Flip camera, everybody can do this.

3) It’s not expensive.

While you could spend $1,000′s on cameras, state of the art software and what have you, you don’t need to. No matter how much you want to invest, there is an option for you!

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