Video Marketing for the Broke and Talentless

Written by Susan on July 22nd, 2009

You don’t have to surf the web for long before you begin to notice a hot trend on people’s websites – videos. They’re fun, they’re eye-catching, they’re attention grabbing. A short, well-made video is a hypnotically good technique for gathering a crowd of people around your product or service and showing them just what it is you’ll be offering them if they spend their money with you. A savvy marketer is going to want to integrate this technique into their strategy with no further delay.

If you don’t have an easy means of creating a video – the software to do a professional, polished video can run to hundreds of dollars, after all – never fear. Animoto.com is one of the coolest sites I’ve ever come across, and I recommend it with immense enthusiasm! Even if all you have is a handful of pictures (royalty free, of course!), you can be 5 minutes away from having an incredibly slick, wholly unique video that you can download, marketing whatever you want. (To show you how easy it is, click here to see my very first video with Animoto.) It’s even free, up to 30 seconds! For a whole year’s worth of all the videos you can make, it’s only $30. They provide the cool graphics, the music (if you don’t have any of your own that you’d prefer) and will even upload your video to YouTube for you. Run, don’t walk, and sign up now.

Once you have a video ready to go, you’ll want to know where to upload it. Most major search engines have a video search option, which makes it easy for people to find videos on whatever topic they’re interested in. This is good news for marketers. By knowing which are the top video sites, you can make the most of them for getting traffic to your site.

Google certainly needs no introduction. As one of the biggest search engines around, it offers a powerful video search option allowing seekers to find a video on almost any keyword imaginable.

Yahoo! too. Like Google, it has keyword, image and search functions making it a great spot to upload a video and attract buyer attention.

BlinkX is a video search engine that is arguably the best choice for making the most of your video marketing strategy. It uses a revolutionary technique of searching for videos by using voice recognition as well a visual analysis of each video to ensure that it is being classified properly. Other search methods use metadata to index their video files, but relies on the honesty of the person uploading the files. How many times have you searched for a video, only to see something completely irrelevant and off-topic pop up? The chances of that happening on BlinkX is greatly reduced.

YouTube – everybody’s favorite time-sucker – is a wonderful directory for getting your video indexed and viewed by millions of people all over the world. They offer helpful tips on how to market your video to optimize eyeball count and targeted traffic.

There are many, many more video upload sites that can be useful, but rather than list them here, I’m going to suggest you nip over to TubeMogul.com and join up. TubeMogul is a free service that lets you upload your video once, and they distribute it to dozens of video directories automatically – including social networking sites – and they even track all the relevant statistics so you know who’s watching your videos, as well as when, where, and how often.

There’s no longer any question about the necessity of adding videos to your marketing arsenal. With free and affordable tools like Animotoand TubeMogul, you can have your singing, dancing presence on the web, bringing in traffic in numbers that may astonish you.