Posts Tagged ‘web traffic’

Since my last post on Video Marketing following the Alex Jeffreys Bonus Webinar with Maria Andros, I have made my first video.  Made it, you understand, not uploaded it anywhere yet!

I did it by switching my digital camera to video mode - (that is I slid the button on the top to “video”!) and pressing the shutter! 

Now, I am my own worst critic, but my husband runs a very close second! – and with it being my first ever video I definitely didn’t want him behind the camera!  Maria Andros said that video marketing was the ultimate “safe environment” because you are not with the people when they watch it.  You don’t know if they switch it off after a few seconds, fall about laughing at you or watch it 14 times before sending the link to their mates.  But I still had to record it!.

So, not having a tripod and “flying solo”, I set the camera on a pile of books and checked that my head was appearing in the view finder, by FACING a mirror.  This meant I could see the image being recorded by looking at the picture on the back of the camera in the mirror.  (Is that clear?) After a few seconds “dry run”, I decided I needed a bit of zoom so there was more of me and less of the background in frame.  I made the adjustments and I was good to go!

Maria said, “Videos let you be you”.  I took a deep breath, looked into the camera, smiled and started talking.  I did the whole video in one take - thus making just one more distinction between me and the Hollywood legend, Marilyn Monroe (just in case any of you were confused on that point!)

I couldn’t watch it back for ages!  The lighting is awful, I move my head too much and at times I gabble BUT I was pleasantly surprised.  It covered all the things I wanted to say and in under 7 minutes! (which is good as videos uploaded to YouTube have to be less than 10 mins long).  I decided not to try improve the lighting as I don’t think the message would be so spontaneous.  Anyway, I’ll be embedding it in this site (when I’ve figured out how to do that) so let me know what you think!

The next thing is to edit it.

I’m happy with the general flow of it but I want to put my name on the screen when I say it, and the URLs too (ambitious or what?).  However, my digital camera records in a .mov format.  Windows Movie Maker (on my computer and almost certainly on yours too) does not recognise this format (Oh Great!).  So I had to find a program that will do the conversion.  For anyone with the same issues, head over to AVS and download the Video Converter program.  This is a clean link for a free download.  Just for good measure, I also downloaded the Video Editor program.  

So now I just need to work the magic with these programs.  For a non-techie I’ve had a very busy day and feel like I’ve learnt something.  And bearing in mind that:

• 52% of online traffic now comes from videos
• 12% of all online traffic comes from YouTube 
• YouTube is now the 3rd most sought on website (Google and Yahoo being the first two)

Guess where I’ll definitely be uploading to..?