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February Newsletter
Creating videos for your website is a great way to engage your customer and help your SEO efforts. If you are like most small business owners, you are working on a budget and can't afford to have a video professionaly produced. No worries, there are many low cost options that will work just as well. It can be as easy as 1, 2, 3.
Step 1. Video Topic
Not sure what types of videos will work for your website? Here are a few suggestions to help get you started:
- video testimonials - studies have shown that video testimonials are considered more believable than text ones.
- How to's - a video demonstration of how your product or service works, not only answers questions from perspective buyers but also makes the product seem more tangible since it is now more than just a flat image. How-to's are also a great way to feature benefits of the product that you may not otherwise be able to highlight.
- Blogs - rather than typing your blog, consider recording it as a video. This allows people to feel more of a connection to your company since they can now associate a face with it. If you are selling products, you may also be able to work your product into the video as a visual a lot easier than trying to fit it into your written blog.
Step 2. Record your video
- Cell Phones -- A lot of cell phones today have video recording capabilities. Now this is certainly not the ideal way to go, but if you are in a pinch and want to record a video blog or a quick shot of your product in action a cell phone is an option.
- Digital Camera -- As with cell phones, a lot of digital cameras now allow you to record video as well. The resolution is typically better than you will get on your cell phone, but you will still be limited to the amount of memory on your camera.
- Web Camera -- A simple web cam (starting at just under $20) and a microphone (some laptops have built in microphones) and you can create video blogs, customer testimonials and simple how-to's and demonstrations.
- Digital Camcorder -- If you have a digital camera that you can connect to your computer USB or FireWire ports or by recording to DVD, then you should be able to work with most video editing softwares to create web ready videos.
- PowerPoint -- Combine a PowerPoint presentation with recorded audio and you have an on-demand webinar that can be posted on your website. Slideshare.net has some free tools to help with this.
Step 3. Publish
There are a number of websites out there that allow you to upload/record, edit and then embed videos directly into your site. YouTube is of course the most popular of these sites, and they can work with all formats except recording a live video cam feed. A website to check out for editing your videos is jumpcut.com. If you want to use a web camera to record your video, then I suggest checking out websites like hellodeo, vlip and bubbleguru.
That's it. Pretty simple right? Now get out there and start recording.
If you missed last month's article on landing pages you can read it now by clicking here.
Conversion Rate: The number of visitors to a website that take a desired action divided by the total number of visitors to that website.
If visitors get to your website and run into problems of any kind they are highly unlikely to become a conversion; in fact depending on the problem they wouldn't be able to even if they tried. Sometimes even a little thing like a wrong color on a checkout button can prevent a person from completing their order as Amazon found out when a color blind man contacted them because he could not see the check out button because the color was not different enough from the background. Below I will go into more detail about specific things to look at on your website.
Navigation
Text Formatting -- Content is very important for both search engine purposes and giving people a reason to visit and stay on your website. A page of size 12 Times New Roman text is not likely going to keep them on your site. When people first get to a web page they tend to scan it first and then decide if it is worth further reading. Help them decide they should read your website, by breaking up your text using
headlines,
bold text,
highlighting,
- bulleted/ numbered lists,
- Making sure you have alt tags with your images (122.jpg means a whole lot less than "oak mission coffe table"). Search engines also look at alt tags when reading your site.
- Do you have enough contrast between your text and background colors? Using two shades of the same color may look nice, but it can be hard to read and impossible to read if you are color blind.
- Not all web browsers are created the same, so while your site may look wonderful in Internet Explorer 6 that doesn't mean it looks good in Firefox or even Internet Explorer 7. The only way to know is to look. If you find differences that you can't live with or fix yourself, it may be best to seek professional help.
and
There are of course a few exceptions, using a pop-up window that is sized smaller than the main window to show a larger view of an image, or your terms of service, or sometimes offering a special deal in a smaller pop-up window works as well.
Accessible -- Having an accessible website means that it can be used by all those that visit it. This means it is readable by screen readers (used by the blind to get around the Internet), viewable in multiple Internet browsers, and viewable by the color blind.
Things to look at on your site include:
Call to Action -- Once someone gets to your web page you need to make it clear what you want them to do. Prominently display your newsletter sign-up box. Make that buy now button unmissable. Make sure people know what action you want them to take.
Next Month's Focus: Your USP