How to Edit and Market Your Web Videos

In this final installment of 3 articles, Gareth Davies, author of “Videotastic!” looks first at editing video footage, and then suggests some ways you can market them online.

Post Production:

Edit, Edit and edit again – you need to be ruthless when you edit. Just because a clip took ages to shoot, or cost you more money than you planned, donít be tempted to leave it in the edit for that reason alone. Edit, edit and edit again to make sure your video only contains footage that aid the story.

Cut to the chase – web videos need to be immediate and straight to the point and long intros can lose an audience. Treat your final videos like a web page, as youíll only have a few seconds to draw people in, so cut to the chase. Think shorter rather than long but without losing the key information.

Have a clear call to action – if your using your video to inspire someone to call you or visit your website donít be afraid to state that in the video, or have text on the screen to support this. Whilst a huge sales message all over the screen running all the way through a video can look tacky, look to find a way to integrate a purposeful, clear call to action, maybe at the end.

Easy on the fancy effects – if you plan your shoot well youíll be less reliant on transition effects in the edit. Fancy transitional effects like barn doors and spinning tiles on some of the home-user video edit systems can scream amateur.

Add to video sharing sites:

YouTube – YouTube has huge coverage and is now officially now the #2 search engine in the world after Google. Its free to add videos to YouTube and you can easily share the link or embed the video onto your website or blog. Another upside is that YouTube results can also show in the Google listings.

Upload to other sharing sites too – websites like MetaCafe, Daily Motion and Vimeo can deliver decent exposure for certain types of videos. If there are video sites in your niche then look at those too as some can deliver views on par with YouTube if your content is very well tailored to them.

Video SEO – Get your videos seen:

Online PR – Promote your video with online press releases by using a distribution service – this will let people know you have produced some compelling videos as well as help drive some transient links to your website.

Have a landing page - Create a page on your website hosting your web video. Give search engines plenty of text information to crawl too, by adding text-based descriptions about the video, or transcribe the audio and include it on the page.

Get links to your landing page – use your content rich video landing page as a destination for link building from related websites and blogs to get Googleís attention.

Use social media – websites like Twitter and FaceBook can be great places to promote your video content. You can share links to your video content on Facebook with friends and colleagues as well as Tweet about it on Twitter.

Re-purpose your video content – Think about ways you can extract the information from your web videos and convert to other mediums that you can then promote further online. The audio may make a good podcast, think about ways to take still image screenshots of your video and upload that to sites like Flickr. Sometimes you can even make PowerPoint slides and upload those to sharing sites too.

The ideas and opinions expressed by the author are not necessarily those of Marketing Pilgrim.