Getting a nice video for your homepage not only is good for branding, but also valuable in saving your customers time. This will make them appreciate you more and hopefully shorten the conversion process. Having a homepage video may not guarantee success on your site, but it will never hurt.

I believe video offers a unique opportunity to present yourself to your customers. Doctors, lawyers, accountants, and other professional services providers are great candidates to use video to sell themselves.

In short, don’t assume your potential customers are going to dig through all your copy to get to know you. Make it easier on them and create a nice video to watch. Doesn’t matter what business you are in, a video presentation will make you look even better!

For now, Flash is the best method to deliver video content on websites while HTML5 is the best way to deliver content on apple devices. Buystream knows it’s important for your content to be accessible in a variety of ways. We are working toward a simple solution that will allow your content to be seen on mobile devices even if it does not have the great interactive features that our flash player currently has.

As this debate unfolds and HTML5 matures, Buystream may move to using HTML5 throughout our system. However, currently HTML5 is an immature technology that doesn’t even have a standard video codec for all browsers. Until this technology is more mature and has true standards across all browsers, we’ll continue to use flash to deliver some of the most interactive and powerful e-commerce video technology on the market.

From www.fastpivot.com:

Since 1997, FastPivot has offered complete online retail solutions for merchants of all sizes. FastPivot provides retailing strategies, designs, and technologies that help move your online store forward, not just better than they you were, but smarter, and definitely by not taking the ordinary approach.

Our forte is Yahoo! Store Design and Development, but our team of creative, programming, strategy and software specialists work with a variety of ecommerce platforms. From start-ups to established brand leaders, FastPivot can help you succeed.

Fast Pivot is quickly becoming a leader in mobile store upgrades and social media marketing for Yahoo stores.  Mobile and social initiatives should be at the top of any marketers list. Fast Pivot can help your Yahoo store get to the next level and open up new sales channels. We look forward to working with Fast Pivot and their clients. We encourage our Yahoo Store clients to visit with Fast Pivot when you are looking for store upgrades, design, and solutions.

Video SEO means using video to get your website seen more often in Google, Yahoo, Bing etc… In many ways it’s the same as optimizing your pages with good meta titles and meta descriptions. It’s important to surround your videos with a meta title, description, and tags. Search engines now index video just like they do web pages. However, you need to submit a video sitemap to Google and an mRSS feed to other search engines like Yahoo.

Search engines increasingly use “blended” search results after inquiries are made. This means that not only are the most relevant websites showing up as always, but also images, news, blogs, and video. If you optimize your videos properly, your site can appear in organic results AND in blended search with a video thumbnail that is more visual and compelling for searchers to click on.

What About Youtube?

What about it? It’s important to understand what Youtube is and what it isn’t. Youtube is an audience. It’s probably one of the largest audiences in the world. It’s important to get your content in front of this audience as long as your content is relevant to them. Youtube is not a guaranteed source of traffic nor is it an automatic “viral” marketing tool. Very few videos go viral on Youtube. The ones that do rarely have anything to do with products and services being marketed to the audience.

Should you put your videos on youtube and on your website? The answer isn’t as simple as it seems. Search engines look for unique content. What if you have the exact same video playing on your site, Youtube, Vimeo, Daily Motion, Revver, Viddler etc….which one of those videos is going to show up in the search results? Hopefully it’s the one on your site so that users can not only watch the content, but also convert into customers.

It’s important to get an audience, but it’s more important to bring that audience to a place where they can convert on your audience. Whenever possible, use unique content for the different social media sites from that which is on your website. Ideally the content should be shorter and be more of an invitation to visit your site to learn more about the offer.

In short, don’t let Youtube compete with your site for traffic. Remember, Youtube wants traffic because they make money off of advertising. Don’t let them make more money off your content than you do.

What Video SEO is Not

There are technologies on the horizon which will look inside video content and determine what that video content is about. So if there is a red truck, it will be able to determine that and allow searchers to find videos of red trucks based on the content itself. However, those technologies are primitive and are not a part of the main search engines today. It’s important to ensure your video content is relevant and fresh, but video SEO is still about meta data surrounding the video, not the pixels inside the video itself.

Video Video Video

When done properly, video can increase conversion and traffic to your site. It’s more work, but it will pay off. Create videos about all your products, services, and brands. Create videos about targeted search phrases you want to rank well for. It will pay off. Video search results are not nearly as competitive as organic search, so get a jump on it now. In the near future, anyone without video on their site will be at a major disadvantage. In fact, many websites are already at a disadvantage because their competitors recognize the power of video while they do not.

Don’t delay any longer. Get video and get lots of it. We live in a new economy that rewards those who go the extra mile and provide unique, compelling work. Video is not easy, but it’s worth it. If you want a free consultation today, email me personally @ mark at buystream.tv and I’ll let you know which direction I feel you should go.

Buystream now offers video SEO tools that allow you to automatically create video sitemaps and mRSS feeds so you don’t have to create them by hand.

We create streaming video that online consumers can buy from. We seek to create a QVC-type experience to e-commerce companies of all sizes. With that in mind we have decided to brand ourselves and our unique technology as Buystream TV. We feel it important, as do all marketers, that our customers have a connection with and are comfortable with our company name. Buystream TV will continue to create the same great projects as before. We’d love to get your feedback, so let us know what you think of our new name!

Video will be Everywhere: on all Websites

Video on the Web is no longer just about entertainment.  It is also about marketing, instruction, and conveying information of all kinds.

• Content bellwether Wikipedia announced it will be rolling out videos soon enough.
• e-Commerce leader Zappos encourages users to submit their video experiences whichincrease sales 6% to 30%.  In 2010, it will create 50,000 videos.
• It won’t be long before organizations feature their accountants, lawyers, management, VCs in videos too.

It’s important to realize that video is becoming a mission critical component of websites, not just an option. Video’s SEO, branding, and conversion values are too high to ignore. What are you waiting for? Time to add video to your site!

1. Determine your the video’s purpose. Is the video the focal point of the page? Supplementary? or for entertainment? If it’s the focal point, it’s likely visitors are anticipating the video before they get there. If so, it’s ok to auto-play it. If it’s just supplementary or for entertainment, they may not be expecting a video and it’s best to have it click-to-play.

2. Is your page a landing page or a regular page on your site? If it’s a landing page, recent articles have suggested that while auto-play videos can be powerful, they don’t necessarily increase conversion rates.

3. On product pages, our customers have seen success with auto-play, but it depends on your audience and your product. If your product is subtle, or requires a lot of decision time, it’s probably best to not force the video on the viewer. If it’s a cool, hip, exciting product, it’s likely that an auto-play video is appropriate.

In the end, it’s important to have good video content. If it’s compelling, people will watch it and enjoy it regardless of auto-play and click-to-play options. Just remember, when in doubt do a test! Try both versions and see what happens.

Zoobies sells a stuffed animal that is also a pillow and a fold out blanket. Here is a picture of a zoobie pet and a regular stuffed animal:

Ok, so one of these folds out into a cool blanket and also acts as a pillow. Which one? It would be hard to tell if you were looking at them on the shelf of a toy store. The one on the left is a Zoobie pet. Even if I included the rest of the images, it wouldn’t do it justice. That’s why Zoobies is considering adding a library of video about each of their products.

If demonstration is key to helping your clients either see the full functionality of your product or in helping them see the competitive advantage it has over other products, then video is essential! With all the tools now available to business owners in 2010, there is no reason not to add video to your site! Find a way to get video soon. I might know of some affordable video production and cool delivery technology if you are interested Happy Friday!

Zappos is large enough that they hired 40 full-time video production employees to make it happen. Most of our customers don’t have those kinds of resources. that’s why you can rely on Qgia to create a video library of your top 5 or 10 products at an affordable cost. To read more about the zappos.com product video campaign, click here. You’ll notice they are also making their videos interactive by using one of our competitors, overlay.tv.

Adding interactivity and then making the video player embeddable on blogs and other sites is like creating a portable, clickable digital billboard that can drive shoppers to your site with the intent to purchase.

Sixty-eight percent of the top 50 Internet retailers use video content on their Web sites, compared with 18% in 2008. Online retailers are committed to making product videos central to their merchandising and marketing strategies because of the positive return on investment (ROI) that this visual feature generates. While only 16% of online buyers watch product videos on retailer Web sites, 64% of those consumers who do have found these videos to be very useful. Retailers should focus on understanding drivers of consumer usage and find appropriate contextual uses for product videos by integrating them into the overall eCommerce experience.

We provide affordable production for every facet of product videos. We also provide a video content management system, professional streaming, and unbranded interactive player technology. Email me at mark at qgia.com and I can give you a free video consultation to see if there is anything we can do for you.