You Tube Up Close & Personal

 

You Tube Drives Traffic

You Tube receives 4 billion hits a day.  You Tube is the second largest search engine and the third most visited website that there is.  Currently 72 hours of video footage are uploaded to You Tube every minute (September 2012).   The average visitor spends 23 minutes per day on You Tube while the age demographic ranges from toddler to 54 year old.  The best thing about You Tube is that it shows up in Google searches.  What this means is that you are fifty times more likely to be found on You Tube than a blog post.  Yet a survey of a large audience found that while 82% of the group viewed You Tube in the last 7 days , only 11% had ever put up a video.  So you know what to do.  Its time to start making your own You Tube videos to drive traffic to your website or blog. 


Reasons To Make Your First Video

1. It draws qualified traffic.
2. Excellent for branding and showing professionalism.
3. Establishes you as an author with celebrity status.
4. Ranks better than articles.
5. Its free and can work forever.

Where To Start
Look at videos in your niche.  Use the Google Keyword Tool to identify 30 keywords in your niche and build ideas around these keywords.  The types of videos that work well are "how to" videos and music videos. 


Essential Video Ingredients
I wanted to know what makes a good You Tube video and came up with the following list.

1. Provide value.  For many this means getting your message across in an entertaining way.  Apparently 68% of the audience want entertainment and 28% want information, so the trick is to reach a happy medium.
2. Be relevant to your video key words.
3. Short and to the point, ideally in 3 to 5 minutes.
4. Demonstrate what you are saying.  A head and shoulders video of you getting your message out will not work.  The trick here is to able to put your words into a graphical context.  This needs thought but it will make or break the success of your video.  A metaphor here would be to think in terms of visual answers.
5. Have a call to action.
6. Get viewers to subscribe and share.
7. Get viewers to click a link to your website.
8. Tell your audience what to do, why to do it and how to do it.
9. Above all be consistant.
    

The Breakup of a Good Video
So in laying out the storyline for your video you need to achieve the following
Grab attention in 2-6 seconds:
Intro bumper in 4-7 seconds.  This is your logo with music
The content in 1-5 minutes.  Do this, this and this to solve your viewers' problem with call to action
Outro bumper in 4-7seconds. Your branded logo again
Outtakes in 4-7 seconds.  Include your mistakes as they humanise you

  

My Video Isnt Getting Any Results
If your video fails to drive traffic, it will be for the following reasons:
the video is too boring.  Remember head and shoulders doesnt work.
your video is not optimised for keywords
or you dont understand You Tube etiquette and need more engagement.

 

Equipment
Ideally you should have a camera with an external mic jack.  In today's world of HD movie cameras sound if often the limiting factor.  A lapel mcrophone is ideal.  However the best place to start is with what you have.  Many of today's videos are made simply with an iPhone.  The most important thing about lighting is make sure you dont have shadow on the eyes.  This prevents people from seeing your facial expression.  Videos can be edited with iMovies for the Mac or Windows Movie Maker.  The other option is to farm out your video editing to the likes of Odesk.


Whats Important
The most import thing is to make a start and take action.  Your skills will improve with practice.  As your video marketing pays off you can always up scale your camera equipment.  The important thing is to get in the game.