“Video marketing” sounds like a big deal, but it doesn’t have to be. Savvy internet marketers are giving their campaigns a rich new source of visitors and traffic with what looks like decades-old technology: PowerPoint, and things that look like PowerPoint.
In today’s video marketing, you create anything one to a dozen slides (typically), accompanied by a voice and maybe a soundtrack, then get the whole thing down on video. PowerPoint and Apple’s Keynote are tremendous starting points, but don’t worry about buying software if you don’t have them. There are free apps every step of the way, so don’t worry about cost. This begs the question. If you’ve sat through boring PowerPoints before, you’re quite rightly asking why you’d want to subject others to that kind of treatment and how, incidentally, could they be “traffic powerhouses”? Here are 5 reasons even boring videos make good marketing sense.
Automatically gives you a podcast and an article, too! Once you’ve created a video, you have a script that can be turned into an article, and a soundtrack you can use as a podcast. And why not blog posts announcing each one? Presto, at least 6 pieces of content for the price of one.
Multiple involvement devices: from Related Videos to watermarks, to music to spinning logos. A video gives its consumer many, many ways to be drawn into your universe. Maybe they like your voice. Maybe they like your looks, if you’ve included yourself in the video. Maybe your background music perks up their ears. Maybe you’re graphically gifted and your slides just look good. Every one of these possibilities can mean a customer who’s more ready to visit your site.
Discipline. A simple slide show forces you to get the point across in very few words. This hones your message and forces you to stay on point. Because of this I’m starting to do videos first, then write articles after the videos have been completed. I waste less of the reader’s valuable time and am more likely to say something she wants to hear.
DocsToc and ScribDoc are underrated for SEO. Look carefully at your Google search results. I’m seeing sites like DocsToc and ScribDoc (which accept actual PowerPoint decks as is) appear very high, and they both have killer page rank.
YouTube’s Description is a secret SEO powerhouse: The video description in YouTube can hold articles at least 1,000 words long. Since Google indexes the descriptions, you have some serious search real estate to play with. Smart marketers put a clickable link in the very first part of the description, and smarter marketers include a call to action right after that link (“Click to claim your free special report showing how to become a better public speaker in just 5 minutes”).
So why would someone want to view your slide show? The obvious answer is that you should be promoting a product, whether it’s your own, that of a client, or an affiliate offer, that scratches someone’s itch. They’ve landed on your slide show because they think it will solve a problem.
Last but certainly not least, here’s a bonus reason slide shows are traffic powerhouses: even if your slide show never gets read, it will yield so many other pieces of content and sources of traffic that it does the job it was meant for, popularity contest or not. Try starting your next article as a slide show, and watch your traffic soar along with your productivity.